Lincoln Mitchell's "The Giants and Their City"

Lincoln A. Mitchell is a native San Franciscan and has been a Giants fan since the mid-1970s. He is an adjunct research scholar at Columbia University’s Arnold A. Salesman Institute of War and Peace Studies and the author of several books, including San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock, and a Third-Place Baseball Team.

Mitchell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 is a description of the eighth inning of a game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers on the last day 1982 baseball season. The page begins with a description of Dodgers’ manager, the late Tommy Lasorda, deciding to pinch hit for his ace pitcher Fernando Valenzuela with the score knotted at two. I then describe the Giants’ rally in the bottom half of the inning. The page ends just as Joe Morgan is coming to the plate. Spoiler alert-Morgan hit a three-run home run and the Giants knocked the Dodgers out of the playoffs that day.

In some respects, page 99 provides a good sense of The Giants and Their City as the book is, in large part, about baseball and the Giants. I recount numerous anecdotes and important games from the seventeen seasons covered in the book. The particular game described on page 99 captures something else about the Giants and the book. The Giants were not a very good team during most of the period covered in the book. From 1976-1985 they never finished above third place. Morgan’s home run was one of the two biggest moments for the Giants on the field during these years, but it did not launch them into the playoffs. It simply knocked the Dodgers out, but for Giants fans like me in those years, that was almost as satisfying. A theme of this book, which can be seen on page 99, is that even bad teams have stories and moments that mean a lot to their fans. The book also covers the better Giants years including their World Series appearance in 1989-and the earthquake that disrupted that World Series.

This page does not capture everything about the book, because The Giants and Their City also focuses on the Giants off the field. This includes how the franchise, and the team’s owner Bob Lurie, navigated the changes in the game such as free agency and strikes. Another major off the field focus of the book is the relationship between the Giants and San Francisco, and their struggle throughout this period to find a new home. During these years they played at Candlestick Park, a cold unwelcoming stadium poorly served by public transportation. Because of Candlestick, the Giants always struggled to draw fans and were frequently rumored to be leaving the city, building a ballpark downtown, doming Candlestick or something else. The Giants and Their City is a fun and readable book about the Giants and San Francisco during a fascinating and overlooked period that includes anecdotes and baseball stories and also draws on interviews with several players, executives and others around the Giants.

Visit Lincoln Mitchell's website.

The Page 99 Test: San Francisco Year Zero.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paula Marantz Cohen's "Of Human Kindness"

Paula Marantz Cohen is the Dean of the Pennoni Honors College and Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University, as well as host of the television interview show The Civil Discourse.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy, and reported the following:

Page 99 occurs toward the end of my chapter on King Lear, about ¾ of the way through my short book. I’ve just completed a close reading of Lear that presents it as as a cautionary tale for parents of adult children. Lear has been an abominable parent—one who encouraged competition among his children for his love and he now compounds his bad parenting by refusing to step aside in old age (he wants to give up his kingdom but not his sense of priority). He suffers the consequences. I argue that the play helps us see the marginality that comes with aging and how important it is to accept this philosophically and with magnanimity.

This page is actually an excellent sample of the work as a whole—indeed, it is exceptionally reflective of my method and what I feel the book does best: i.e., read Shakespeare in light of my own and my students’ experience and show how the plays, read in a loosely chronological fashion, encourage readers to enlarge their empathetic imagination.

This is one of the few points in the book when I address my own limitations as a parent but also where I try to show myself some empathy. It’s a very felicitous choice because the page contains what I think, retrospectively, is one of the most honest lines in the book:

“My response [to Lear] may be connected to knowing my own tendency to be manipulative and histrionic as a parent. I am hard on myself and, by extension, hard on Lear.”

Visit Paula Marantz Cohen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Anne Gillett's "At Home in Our Sounds"

Rachel Anne Gillett lectures in cultural history at the University of Utrecht and writes about race, popular culture, and empire. She focuses on the French Empire but her interests range from Marvel movies, to early jazz, to rugby. Her writing appears in blogs and magazines as well as in academic literature and she can be heard on "Unsettling Knowledge," a podcast about how empire shaped European societies. She is deeply interested in how popular culture reflects and influences social and political life and has pursued that theme wherever she has lived and worked, from New Zealand, to America, to the Netherlands.

Gillett applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris, and reported the following:

Page 99 of At Home in Our Sounds describes the impact of the economic depression on Black performers in France, particularly those working in the nightclub scene. This page mostly analyses a long quotation from a lively and opinionated journalist - the self-styled “street-wolf” of Montmartre. Here’s an excerpt with my introduction and that quotation:

In 1922, French musicians had convinced Raymond Poincaré to pre­sent a “10- percent law” to the National Assembly, but it had been more or less ignored until the Depression hit. By 1935, however, Black American reporter Wiggins, the “Street Wolf,” commented on how the tightening up of labor laws had affected Black musicians:

For what seemed an endless period, from June 1, 1933, when the French 10 per cent law (which completely dissolved all foreign orchestras) went into effect until April 20, 1934 ... there was not one Negro jazz orchestra enter­taining in Paris. French jazz orchestras, with one or two exceptions, failed to prove a big attraction and, as the majority of cabaret goers ostensibly preferred the dance music of dark-skinned musicians, Martiniques and Cubans with their rumba and Biguine music became the rage.

The page 99 test delivers a mixed result for my book. It captures my focus on the lived experiences of black musicians in Paris. I insist, throughout the book, on including voices and evidence from musicians themselves and voila, there’s a substantive quotation from a black American, slap bang in the middle of the page. It also captures one of my arguments about music-making and politics – that these are always related. And because they are related we need to think about how music-making is a form of cultural politics. This page’s focus on the experience of Black Americans, however, and quotation from a Black American male reflects but also deviates a bit from the book as a whole.

The rest of the book contrasts and connects the experience of Black Americans with the experience of French individuals and communities who identified – or were identified by others – as Black. We get a hint of that in the closing comment of the quotation – which tells us Black French musicians are now “the rage.” Throughout the book I show how the jazz craze affected Black Americans, French, and also French society and French colonialism more broadly. The other major absence on this page is that there are no women! But throughout the book I include a lot of women because they were there, they were active, and they shaped the music scene. Women participated in the whole complex of cultural, racial and colonial politics that went along with music-making in interwar Paris.

Finally this page, to my delight, reveals some of the strengths of my writing – fascinating quotations, clearly situated in time and place, that give a slice-of-life, and contain loads of evidence to unpack. To my shame, it also reveals my writing weaknesses - which I thought I’d worked hard to remove! Some jargon, some complex sentences, and extensive footnotes that interrupt the flow of reading. All lessons for the next book!

Learn more about At Home in Our Sounds at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Courtney E. Thompson's "An Organ of Murder"

Courtney E. Thompson is an assistant professor of the history of science and medicine and U.S. women’s history at Mississippi State University in Starkville. She received her Ph.D. from the program in the history of science and medicine of Yale University in 2015.

Thompson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of An Organ of Murder is the last page of the fourth chapter, where I wrap up an exploration of the “prison as laboratory” by applying Michel Foucault’s notion of the panopticon to the phrenological prison:

[…] While the phrenological gaze within the prison was not persistent or constant in the same fashion as the disciplinary gaze within the panoptic prison, the entry of the phrenologist into the prison added to the observational power and unequal gaze imposed upon prisons, by contributing an aspect of predictive anatomical knowledge and judgment through vision. Phrenologists, including Spurzheim, Gall, the Fowler brothers, and others, gave prison wardens, as well as attorneys and judges, detailed reports on their observations of inmates, sometimes warning wardens of particularly dangerous inmates who might try to escape or behave in a violent manner, and they also acted as expert witnesses on the stand, testifying as to prisoners’ potential for future bad behavior, based on the evidence of their skulls, as discussed in previous chapters. This “laboratory of power” and its disciplinary gaze both produced and were produced by phrenological vision.

The phrenologist also carried this visual regime out of the prison and translated it into daily life. Practical phrenology, by creating and perpetuating a culture of vision predicated on the identification of “good” and “bad” heads, enabled the production of judgment by appearances in daily life, as we shall see in the next chapter. As Foucault observed regarding the mechanism of the panopticon, “the more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk of the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed.” As in the prison, so too on the street: power grows more diffuse as more eyes are encouraged and empowered to look and judge. But beyond the structure of the prison, all people are both seeing and seen, an inversion of the dynamic of the panoptic prison that does nothing to dilute the disciplinary power of vision. A student of practical phrenology in midcentury America was primed to engage in panoptic practices on the street, seeking “bad heads” and a propensity for crime before its commission. As Foucault has suggested, a panoptic system “was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function.” In mid-nineteenth-century America, phrenology provided the means, Foucault’s warning realized: “The gaze is alert everywhere.”

In this case, the Page 99 Test works quite well; if I had to choose a short selection from the book to sum up my major arguments and interventions, this page would be a good choice, as it signals the high stakes involved with the phrenological attention to the question of crime. Phrenology was used in prisons, in courts, and on the streets to distinguish between “good” and “bad” heads, and that resulted in real effects on people’s lives. (This is also, amusingly, the most theory I engage with in the book, with the heavy Foucault influence here; in this, this page is not a great representation of the writing style and overall approach of the text.)

The one important piece missing, however, is the language of criminality. The book explores both language and image: this passage speaks only to the visual culture and visual signs of phrenological criminality. The language used to describe criminal potential, however, was equally significant, leading to long-lasting effects on how we describe criminality in law, medicine, and culture today.

Learn more about An Organ of Murder at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven B. Smith's "Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes"

Steven B. Smith is Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including Modernity and Its Discontents.

Smith applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes, and reported the following:

The Page 99 test works quite well for my book. It is close to the center of the book and as discerning readers know, the middle is always the most important part.

Page 99 begins a section titled “Constitutional Faith” and it introduces the idea of what is unique about American patriotism. American patriotism is rooted in a form of faith or reverence for the Constitution. This quasi-religious faith is sometimes referred to as a civil religion but it is a religion of a peculiar kind.

American patriotism is not rooted in nationalistic beliefs about blood and soil or on religious beliefs about divine promises but has always been based on reason. From our beginnings patriotism has contained a deliberative and self-questioning character. “Who are we?” “What do we stand for?” are questions that have been at the core of our national identity. To be an American is to be continually engaged in asking what it means to be an American.

Patriotism, I argue, is an ancient but often misunderstood disposition. The term derives from the Greek patris (place of one’s ancestors) and the Latin patria (fatherland). Both are inseparable from the word politics. As the name suggests, patriotism is associated with love of country where this means what do we look up to as a people. American patriotism has always had an aspirational quality. It means devotion not only to what we are but what we hope to be as this expressed in our founding documents.

Today patriotism is under attack from both left and right. From the left, cosmopolitans reject it because they think patriotism is like some mafia code of omertà that requires unconditional loyalty and a willful blindness to our national failings. From the right, nationalists basically agree with that premise but choose loyalty over free thought, seeing criticism of America as treasonous. Both of these attacks are wrong. At its best, patriotism isn’t indoctrination into a cult of the nation but a form of moral education. Patriotism teaches that real loyalty to our country involves virtues like civility, law-abidingness, respect for others, responsibility, love of honor, courage and leadership. Rather than saying “my country right or wrong,” patriotism is reflective and self-critical, working to bring America closer to the country it can and should be.

Learn more about Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Howard Smith's "A Dream of the Judgment Day"

John Howard Smith is Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Commerce and author of The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725-1775.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Dream of the Judgment Day: American Millennialism and Apocalypticism, 1620-1890, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Dream of the Judgment Day appears in a chapter explaining the degrees of millennialism attending the American Revolution. Most of the page is dominated by a paragraph that discusses the reactions Pietist sects had to the Revolution, specifically its being, in their opinion, “the regrettable outcome of civil strife born of an overall inattention to Christian duty.” That particular paragraph is not highly reflective of the book itself, except to underscore the hypocrisy of the Patriots’ demanding liberty and equality for themselves while denying those rights to any who opposed them or, in the case of some Quakers and other neutral religious groups, those who refused to take part on either side of the conflict. American Christians, especially those of radical Protestant persuasions, tend to see the world in starkly Manichean terms of good versus evil. Good Christians stand for Christ and the righteous, and any who does not has sided with Satan and the damned. The American Revolutionaries generally believed that the Revolution was a prophesied event, or otherwise shared a millenarian conviction that it was the beginning of a new era for human civilization, if not the dawning of the Millennium itself. Anyone who questioned or opposed the Revolution was thus lumped with the Antichrist—a trope that has become a feature of American politics even to the present day.

The following paragraph does emphasize an important and timely point that I think my book makes. “Loyalists had long argued that the merchant leaders of the Revolution were a cabal—or a network of cabals—organized to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority of colonists who depended upon them for the necessities of living. Patriots countered by portraying Loyalist elites as sunk in the same corruption that had eaten away the British constitution.” Popular apocalypticists throughout the history of Christianity—especially in the United States—consistently appealed to the concerns of lower-class people in ways that mirror those of elites currying political support. Revolutionaries like John Adams exulted that American victory in the War for Independence was a fulfillment of prophecies in the Book of Daniel, while others employed millenarian rhetoric in order to maintain popular support for independence and—later on—for ratification of the Constitution, anti-French sentiment in the late 1790s, the War of 1812, Manifest Destiny, and both sides of the Civil War, to name only a few examples. Millennialism and apocalypticism are deeply interwoven with the fabric of American society from its beginnings, and remains so to this day.

Learn more about A Dream of the Judgment Day at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Thompson Ford's "Dress Codes"

Richard Thompson Ford is a Professor at Stanford Law School. He has written about law, social and cultural issues and race relations for The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Slate, and has appeared on The Colbert Report and The Rachel Maddow Show. He is the author of the New York Times notable books The Race Card and Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality.

Ford applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the last page in a pivotal chapter in the book entitled “The Great Masculine Renunciation.” Page 99 addresses the 1844 case of Regina v. Whittaker, which established the rule that English barristers must wear a powdered wig or “bench wig” when appearing before the court.

This in and of itself may seem like esoterica, but it actually reveals a lot: the wig is a great example of the way fashions that began as elite status symbols were used by people lower in the social hierarchy—not just to copy or try to masquerade as the elites but for their own purposes. It is also an example of how status symbols changed from flamboyant and opulent to subtle and elegant. The powdered wig began as a classic status symbol, worn by French royalty as a symbol of masculine virility and royal pedigree. But over time the wig became popular with all social classes. And the wigs themselves got smaller—less ostentatious and more unobtrusive.

This reflected a broader change in men’s fashions in the 18th century, which the psychologist John Carl Flugel called the Great Masculine Renunciation, when “men gave up their right to all of the brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these entirely to the use of women.” Opulence and ornamentation—once signs of high status associated with honor and magnificence—then became associated with waste, frivolity and vanity. The Great Masculine Renunciation reflected an abandonment of political hierarchy based on inherited status and dynasty and the rise of Enlightenment ideals of industriousness, modesty and self-discipline and—to some extent—equality. So while Louis Quatorze wore a big, full wig, Thomas Jefferson wore a modest, short wig and Benjamin Franklin eventually stopped wearing a wig altogether (George Washington styled his own hair to look a lot like a wig, but apparently did not actually wear one.)

But this new egalitarianism did not extend to women—this was a Great Masculine Renunciation. And the Great Renunciation replaced outdated status symbols that were obvious and easy to copy with new status symbols that were subtle and understood only by those already in the know. Status symbols based on flash and showiness were replaced by status symbols based on refinement and savoir faire.

This kind of male wig now remains only as something highly formal and specialized—like a formal coat with tails, which incidentally, the federal government’s lawyer, the Solicitor General, still wears today when arguing before the Supreme Court of the United States. So the English have their bench wigs and we American lawyers have our antiquated customs too.

Visit Richard Thompson Ford's website.

The Page 69 Test: Racial Culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Frazer's "Shakespeare and the Political Way"

Elizabeth Frazer teaches political thought and political theory at the University of Oxford. Her publications include Can Violence Ever Be Justified? (with Kimberly Hutchings, 2019), and she is the author of articles about ideals of politics in political thought and education.

Frazer applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Shakespeare and the Political Way, and reported the following:

Page 99 sets out the story of Friar Laurence, in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet which, as I tell it here, figures Laurence as a magus figure who meditates on the occult qualities of things, relationships, and actions, and also, critically for the book, as a ‘Machiavellian’ political operator who seizes the opportune moment – kairos - and takes the chance. In Machiavelli’s political philosophy, chronos – the flow of events, causes and effects – is important too, of course, but acting with or even against kairos sets political action apart from administration, for instance, or legal judgement. Laurence goes in for ingenious plans, and has to use his persuasive powers to recruit others to his scheme.

I am a bit disappointed with Page 99, partly because of the look of the layout – lots of cites to Shakespeare’s text in brackets. How about Page 171: ‘The idea that politics and magic are deeply intertwined with one another is both preposterous and commonsensical.’? Or Page 35: ‘In Othello we hear two distinct streams of free speech, with different political implications.’

Critics have argued about ‘Shakespeare and politics’ for ages – mainly asking whether the plays endorse a broadly ‘right wing’ view of the importance of stable sovereignty and established social order, or whether they endorse a more ‘left wing’ view with their representations of popular claims for justice and women’s subversion of patriarchy. There is also a good deal of amazing scholarship which shows how the cover of the dramatic stage permits allusions to current events and, especially, evaluations of the character and conduct of monarch and governmental officers that could not be voiced openly. But all this work tends to overlook another aspect of Shakespeare and politics: the plays’ extraordinarily acute and subtle understanding of both the elusiveness and the contested nature of ‘political power’. Plots often pit against one another rival constructions of ‘politics’: as divinely ordained sovereignty, as patriarchal authority (not the same thing), as free speech, or as tumultuous action, as the rightful prize for honourable military violence, as nothing more than economic – financial or commercial – clout, as violent domination disguised as magic capability .... And so on. That’s what the book is about – and I hope it might make a contribution to our twenty first understandings and evaluations of ‘politics’, as well as casting new light on the matter of Shakespeare and politics.

Learn more about Shakespeare and the Political Way at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Heinecke's "Radiant"

Liz Heinecke has an undergraduate degree in art from Luther College, a master's degree in bacteriology from UW Madison and worked as an academic molecular biology researcher before starting her wildly successful online educational platform KitchenPantryScientist.com. She has written seven books teaching kids (and their parents) how to perform simple science experiments at home, including two which pair science experiments with history lessons about scientists. Heinecke is a regular fixture on local TV morning shows including CBS and ABC, and frequently makes appearances for library programs, and at STEM, STEAM and tech festivals. Between experiments and writing, she paints, sings, and plays the banjo. She lives in Minneapolis, MN.

Heinecke applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Radiant: The Dancer, The Scientist, and a Friendship Forged in Light, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Radiant- The Dancer, The Scientist and a Friendship Forged in Light drops in on a conversation between Nobel-winning scientist Marie Curie and her five-year-old daughter Irene, who would go on to win a Nobel prize of her own. Marie describes to Irene how a piece of scientific equipment called an electroscope works. To illustrate the concept, she asks Irene to touch her head and uses her hands to demonstrate how the metallic strips in an electroscope respond to electrical charge.

The page is an excellent representation of the book, which is a creative nonfiction narrative about Marie Curie and the dancer-inventor Loie Fuller. It refers to Marie’s traumatic childhood under the Russian occupation of Poland and to her first exposure to science— through her father’s cabinet of scientific equipment. In addition, it introduces a piece of equipment called an electrometer, which was instrumental in Marie’s monumental discovery of the element radium. The scene also hints to the reader that Marie was a loving mother and a wonderful teacher, whose love of science infused almost every moment of her life and ignited Irene’s love of physics.

Marie Curie met Loie Fuller when the famous dancer asked her for some radium to light her dancing costume. From the time I started writing, I imagined their story on a stage, with Loie spinning like a lily under a rainbow of light and Marie waltzing through her lab, surrounded by glowing tubes of radium. Creative non-fiction allowed me to animate scenes from their lives and invent dialogue based on facts I discovered in autobiographical documents, first person accounts such as Eve Curie’s biography of her mother, letters, personal journals, and newspaper articles. At times, especially in the case of Loie Fuller, who gave hundreds of interviews and kept extensive journals, I was able to incorporate Loie and Marie’s own words into the text.

Visit Liz Heinecke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dennis J. Frost's "More Than Medals"

Dennis J. Frost is Wen Chao Chen Associate Professor of East Asian Social Sciences in the Department of History at Kalamazoo College. He is author of Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan.

Frost applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan, and reported the following:

The first full paragraph on page 99 of More Than Medals reads:

On the one hand, the APC has clearly distanced itself from the problematic paternalistic and medicalized approach to disability sports that defined FESPIC, especially in its early years, and the APC is committed to empowering athletes with disabilities, particularly by providing them with the biggest stage possible on which to demonstrate their exceptional talents. On the other hand, the broader commitment to regional outreach and social issues outside of sport that lay at the very heart of FESPIC’s mission now appear to have become secondary at best. Where the Games had been a means to an end for FESPIC, for the APC they have become an end—or perhaps more accurately a “core asset” essential to the continued viability of the APC—in and of themselves.

Someone browsing this page would likely find themselves asking, “What is the APC or FESPIC? And why are they being compared?” Deeper interests can certainly originate with those sorts of questions, but in this instance, the page 99 test might disappoint readers. In part, that’s because the paragraphs here wrap up a section addressing international institutional transitions that re-shaped disability sports in Japan and the Asian region. Page 99 highlights the impacts of an organizational merger in 2006 that created the current Asian Paralympic Committee (APC) and dissolved the three-decades-old Far East and South Pacific (FESPIC) Games, which serve as the focus of this chapter. Many people are unfamiliar with even the basics of these disability sports organizations, so the significance of the comparisons on page 99 would be too easy to miss. I also hate to imagine that someone reading this single page would think that the book is only about those types of organizational changes. While that’s definitely an important part of the story, there’s much more to the history of disability sports in Japan that I explore in the book.

Even with those limitations, I did note that page 99 hinted at several of the book’s broader themes, so all is not lost for the test! For one, readers’ potential lack of familiarity with FESPIC’s history speaks to larger questions in the chapter, namely, how does a thirty-year-old organization that hosted multiple international disability sports events largely disappear from popular and even institutional memory? And what might that tell us about the oft-discussed legacies of other sports mega-events?

Comparisons between FESPIC and the APC on page 99 also highlight both the evolution of—and tensions within—efforts to promote sports for people with disabilities in Japan. Like other early disability sports events, the FESPIC Games initially focused on sports as a form of medicalized rehabilitation, but they became increasingly geared toward elite competition. From its origins the APC emphasized the elite nature of disability sports, but as this chapter and others in the book point out, rehabilitation-related understandings of disability sports have persisted, with patterns established decades ago continuing to shape how we view athletes with disabilities today. The reference to FESPIC’s mission on page 99 also serves as a reminder that the significance of disability sports in Japan—even with their more recent “elite” approach—has repeatedly extended well beyond the sports field. The Paralympics and disability sports in Japan have always been about more than medals.

Learn more about More Than Medals at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Seeing Stars.

--Marshal Zeringue