Terrence G. Peterson's "Revolutionary Warfare"

Terrence G. Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University. He researches and teaches on France, modern Europe, and their connections to the wider world, with a particular focus on war, empire, and migration.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, and reported the following:

Page 99 puts readers right in the aftermath of key French military operation, known as “Pilote.” This operation wove together a range of new counterinsurgency practices the French Army had experimented on the ground between 1954 and 1957, and it quickly became the model for the French war effort against the Algerian National Liberation Front more broadly until Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962. Page 99 focuses on a particular new kind of unit, the all-female Itinerant Medical Social Team, which sought to capitalize on the dire need for medical care in rural Algerian villages to gain access to these communities. This page lays out some of the activities of these teams—first aid, hygiene lessons, infant care, sewing lessons, etc.—as well as their true function, which was to spread propaganda and gather intelligence.

Page 99 gives readers a good sense of the book’s overall arc, in part because it hints at the disconnect between how French authorities thought these teams would work and how Algerians perceived them. These teams eventually became an important tool for the French Army to attempt to win Algerian hearts and minds, in part because Algerians needed the sorts of medical care and social services the teams offered. But as readers might guess from the relative absence of Algerians themselves on this page and the following few pages, French officers’ perceptions that these teams won Algerians’ goodwill in a straightforward way were really rooted in their own misunderstandings of rural society.

As the book argues more broadly, such efforts to capture the loyalty of Algerians were a central part of the French war effort from the start, but they ironically helped push many Algerians to embrace independence. Through the rest of the chapter that page 99 sits within, these programs appear to work, inflating the confidence of French officers and sparking the interest of foreign militaries around the world, who sought to learn from the French Army’s apparent successes. In the following chapter, however, the bubble bursts as angry Algerians (including women targeted by these itinerant teams!) pour into the streets to express their frustration at the French Army’s violence and to demand their independence. One of the key aims of the book is to counter many of the myths that still persist about the efficacy of French counterinsurgency by showing the full arc of the war and Algerians’ role in shaping it.

Visit Terrence G. Peterson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara J. Charles's "The Medieval Scriptorium"

Sara J. Charles works and studies at Senate House, University of London. She has previously published on various aspects of the history of the book.

Charles applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of the chapter covering monasticism and manuscript production in the West, 500–1050. This page is about the development of book production on the Continent under Charlemagne in the late eighth/early ninth century. It discusses the influence of his spiritual advisor, Alcuin, on the development of monastic scribal culture and the spread of the standardised script, Caroline minuscule.

This page contains a quote from Alcuin which goes right to the heart of what this book is about. The quote reads:

It is an excellent task to copy holy books
and scribes do enjoy their own rewards.
It is better to write books than to dig vines:
one serves the belly but the other serves the soul.

This conveys the central notion that manuscript production was an act of prayer in itself – monks and nuns were writing out the words of God as a sacred task to edify their spirit. This ties into the Benedictine ideal of ora et labora (prayer and work). The development of Christianity and scribal culture alongside each other is central to the theme of the book, although after the thirteenth century manuscript production moved into the secular realm, and it became more of a commercial enterprise. However, the skill and dedication that scribes and artists displayed in creating beautiful manuscripts proves that they did enjoy their own rewards, whether monastic or secular. It also mentions the different texts the scribes copied, indicating that cloistered life was open to different types of intellectual material, which is explored in more detail later in the book.

The second part of the page explains how the Caroline minuscule script spread throughout Charlemagne’s empire. It was part of Charlemagne’s drive to standardise Christianity and to create a unified Church. While this was an early Christian ideal, elsewhere in the book I discuss the various different medieval scripts, and where and why they had the most influence.

Learn more about The Medieval Scriptorium at the Reaktion Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Serene J. Khader's "Faux Feminism"

Serene J. Khader is professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. She holds the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College, and her work on global women’s issues has been published in outlets such as the New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Khader applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop, and reported the following:

Page 99 picks up in the middle of an anecdote about author and lawyer Rafia Zakaria’s experiences in school and cuts to the heart of one of the main problems with white feminism.

The truth, at least as Zakaria saw it, was that her classmates were rebelling into an established subculture, one that didn’t deviate from mainstream Western culture as much as they may have hoped. The subculture is familiar enough that we can mentally populate Zakaria’s classroom with one-night-stand detail sharers and sex column advice readers...without knowing any of the individuals involved. It was a subculture that had the veneer of feminism, and some genuine engagement with both feminist and queer politics, but with accompanying heavy doses of plenty other ills of Western culture.

White feminists, and other faux feminists, often assume that the goal of feminism is to free women from social or cultural expectations. Zakaria, like many Muslim women, was on the receiving end of this assumption from classmates who assumed that her religion meant she was sexually repressed, and that she would be better off if she was more like them. This type of assumption extends into policies that oppress women of color such as laws around Europe and North America that prohibit the wearing of hijab.

But the idea that feminism aims to free women from culture does not just cause harm; it is deeply logically flawed. Page 99 is about the fact that it is impossible for anyone not to be influenced by unchosen cultural norms. None of us chooses things like the language we think in, which types of foods or working hours seem “normal” to us, whether it seems normal to eat with utensils or our hands. Inheriting unchosen practices is not necessarily good or bad, and it is certainly unavoidable.

Once we recognize this, we can see that feminism needs to be grounded in some set of values besides freedom from culture. We can also see another important possibility for fighting patriarchy and white supremacy at the same time—that it is possible to fight sexism from values that are rooted in culture. The chapter goes on to discuss feminists who argue that gender equality is a Muslim value.

The Page 99 Test works because it shows, like much of the book, that white feminism is deeply connected to the idea that feminism is a movement for individual freedom. It also works because it shows the value of philosophical arguments for social justice—being able to see the implications and downstream consequences of our ideas can help motivate us to seek better ones.

Visit Serene Khader's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Travis Vogan's "LeRoy Neiman"

Travis Vogan is professor of journalism and mass communication and American studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of numerous books on sports, media, and culture, including The Boxing Film: A Cultural and Transmedia History.

Vogan applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, LeRoy Neiman: The Life of America’s Most Beloved and Belittled Artist, and reported the following:

My book passes the Page 99 Test to a certain extent. Page 99 sits in the middle of chapter five, which focuses on LeRoy Neiman’s life in Chicago after he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but before he became associated with Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine, which provided the main launching pad for his career as a working artist. At this time, Neiman was experimenting with different styles and trying to find his voice as an artist. He became taken by Chicago’s night life and urban scene. Neiman noticed how this milieu seemed to illustrate some of the arguments of emerging popular sociological works like The Lonely Crowd (1950) and People of Plenty (1954). He began to depict this decadent world of conspicuous consumption with dark-tinted paintings like Cigarette Girl, which offered subtle critiques of the class dynamics, gender inequities, and booze-soaked superficialities marking these spaces.

These critical commentaries on urban culture contrast the colorful and commercial work that eventually made Neiman rich and famous. But they demonstrate an awareness of power and social class that was important to the working-class artist and never actually left his work—even after he started to paint exclusive golf courses, glitzy celebrities, and tony restaurants.

Learn more about LeRoy Neiman at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greg Barnhisel's "Code Name Puritan"

Greg Barnhisel is professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy and James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, as well as editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures, Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, and the scholarly journal Book History.

Barnhisel applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power is the first page of chapter 5, taking Pearson—who will eventually become a Yale literature professor, a high-ranking spy in World War II, a literary fixer, and a Cold War cultural diplomat—to his first professional position, a summer teaching job at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Page 99 is an apt representation of one aspect of the book, as Code Name Puritan is in part a standard biography, and this page continues his life story. However, it’s what I’m calling a “cultural biography,” situating Pearson’s life within a number of ongoing historical developments in which he was enmeshed: the growing recognition of the value of American literature; the birth of “American Studies” as an academic discipline; changing ideas of what the Puritan legacy contributes to the American character; the marriage of universities and the national-security state in the Cold War; and the embrace of experimental modernist literature by elite cultural institutions. I frame Pearson’s life through these developments and they don’t really appear in this short passage.

The test highlights two structural problems that confronted me in writing this book. The first was how to keep readers reading through the early life of a man whom they haven’t heard of, who didn’t end up doing any headline-worthy things, and whose life was quite ordinary. His life only becomes meaningful within these larger contexts, most of which don’t fully coalesce until he is in his thirties. So how to balance the context with creating a vivid portrait of a young man and bringing him to life?

The second was structural. As mundane and ordinary as much of his early life was, his adult life could seem even more monotonous, as he was a Yale professor and very much lived that life. There’s not much of a story arc to an English professor’s life: you teach your classes, you do your research, rinse and repeat annually. Starting in the 1950s Pearson really was doing quite consequential things, but nothing that has a chronological sequence. So the second half of the book jettisons chronology entirely and moves to a thematic structure: the last five chapters all span the same time period (1946-1975), but each focuses on one aspect of his activities. It was a jury-rigged solution to a real conundrum.

Learn more about Code Name Puritan at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Soffer's "Our Nazi"

Michael Soffer is a history teacher at Lake Forest High School. During his tenure at Oak Park and River Forest High School, he taught Holocaust studies in a classroom that former Nazi camp guard Reinhold Kulle used to clean. His writing has appeared in publications such as the Forward, Chicago Jewish History, and the Times of Israel.

Soffer applied the "Page 99 Test" to Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil, his first book, and reported the following:

How did Americans respond when Nazis were uncovered living among them?

Though “Nazi hunters” occupy an almost mythical presence in the American imagining, the efforts to bring America’s Nazis to justice were fraught with controversy. Page 99 of my book, Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil, traces the early opposition to efforts to bring Hitler’s men in America to justice. Much of that early opposition, the page shows, emerged from emigre communities, who worried that revelations their countrymen participated in atrocities would diminish American support for the so-called “Captive Nations” - the Eastern European countries then under Soviet occupation. That opposition, the page shows, was adopted by far right, white nationalist groups; later a more sanitized version would filter to the mainstream. A reader turning to page 99 would encounter the shocking and frustrating reality at the core of Our Nazi: Americans across the country rose to defend the Nazis living in their midst.

Our Nazi’s central storyline follows Reinhold Kulle, a high school custodian whose past as a Nazi camp guard was revealed in 1982. Oak Park, the Chicago suburb where Kulle worked, had won national awards for its commitment to integration and diversity, and had shouted down an abortive neo-Nazi rally just two years earlier. But when Kulle’s past was uncovered, Oak Parkers rallied to his defense. Similar storylines occurred across the country, forcing Americans to grapple with the most fraught moral questions. What did the revelations mean about their friend or colleague? And - perhaps more importantly - what did the revelations mean about themselves, and their own moral standing?

Learn more about Our Nazi at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Natalie A. Zacek's "Thoroughbred Nation"

Natalie A. Zacek is a senior lecturer in American studies at the University of Manchester. Her previous book, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776, won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Book Prize.

Zacek applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Thoroughbred Nation: Making America at the Racetrack, 1791-1900, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Thoroughbred Nation recounts the story of Adam Bingaman, a leading planter in Natchez, Mississippi in the mid-19th century, at a time at which the “Natchez Nabobs” were some of the richest men in the United States. It focuses on his friendship with an affluent free man of color and his long-standing and openly acknowledged relationship with an African-American woman whom he had formerly enslaved. Bingaman was for most of his adult life a leading light of horse racing in both Natchez and New Orleans, and it was at the former city’s racetrack that he met and became an intimate of the black barber and entrepreneur William Johnson. After Johnson’s death in 1851, his widow and daughters moved to New Orleans, where the girls became close friends with Bingaman’s mixed-race daughters, and Bingaman helped to administer Johnson’s estate and found an appropriate residential care facility for Johnson’s son, who suffered from mental health problems.

Bingaman and Johnson are two of the main figures in this book’s chapter on the development of racing in Natchez, from its birth as a rough frontier town at the beginning of the 19th century to its emergence in mid-century at the heart of the most profitable plantation region of the antebellum United States. This page, which describes their cross-racial intimacy that began trackside, reflects Thoroughbred Nation’s interest in the ways in which the racetracks of the US in the 19th century were not just sites of sport but social spaces, in which visitors were expected to follow strict codes of behavior that were calibrated for their gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Adam Bingaman was greatly respected in Natchez not only for his wealth and his expertise in the breeding, training, and racing of blooded horses, but for his looks, charm, and intelligence—a Harvard graduate, he not only spoke a half-dozen European languages but famously entertained the politician and diplomat Edward Everett by making a toast to him in fluent Choctaw. These attributes granted him sufficient prestige that his friendship with a man of color and even his relationship with a formerly enslaved woman did not besmirch his reputation as a grand Southern gentleman. But his was the example that proves the rule: throughout Thoroughbred Nation, the reader will witness the endless anxieties of the nation’s “turfmen” as they strove to ensure that the courses that they managed or patronized would be simultaneously profitable and respectable—and a major element of respectability was maintaining strict physical and social boundaries between attendees of both sexes and all races and ranks. The “making America” to which the book’s subtitle alludes remained throughout the 19th century a process centered on upholding social hierarchies, rather than on encouraging a spirit of openness like Bingaman’s, let alone facilitating the democratic spirit on which Americans have prided themselves since independence.

Learn more about Thoroughbred Nation at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Grace Kessler Overbeke's "First Lady of Laughs"

Grace Kessler Overbeke is Assistant Professor of Theatre, Comedy Writing & Performance at Columbia College, Chicago.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America's First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of First Lady of Laughs is mainly devoted to transcribing one of Jean Carroll's most famous routines, "The Racetrack Routine" in which she offers a comical peek into the goings-on at the horse races. It is one of the few pages in the book in which the reader 'hears' Carroll's voice more than my own. In that sense, it may not be strictly representative of the book as a whole, since it is an analytic biography, not simply a transcription of her work. However, I do think that the transcribed passages represent a valuable contribution of the book. Stand-up—and performance in general—is such a temporary, evanescent form. Whereas a play script can be published and endure well after the performance took place, that is not always the case with stand-up. My hope is that in the moments where the book shifts performance from the screen to the page, it is allowing that performance to broaden its reach. So in that sense, page 99 gives an accurate representation of (at least one of) the goals of the overall work. This is an interesting exercise—sort of a literary equivalent to the idea of "Every Frame a Painting" in film!

Learn more about First Lady of Laughs at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Wilde's "A Blessing and a Curse"

Matt Wilde is an anthropologist and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela, and reported the following:

A Blessing and a Curse is a book about how petro-states shape the everyday lives of their citizens in complex and contradictory ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in urban Venezuela over the course of a decade, it explores how the residents of a low-income periphery known as El Camoruco experienced conflictual social change under the governments of first Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro. One of the book’s central arguments is that the drive to undertake radical social and political reforms using oil revenues produced an array of moral doubts for the residents of El Camruco, as the circulation of petro-dollars in local and everyday settings led to new dilemmas for the pro-government grassroots activists (chavistas) who play a central role in the book’s analysis.

Situated in a chapter titled “The Moral Life of Revolution,” page 99 encapsulates these doubts perfectly. It describes how one of the book’s main protagonists, a local chavista leader known as Rafael, wrestles with the offer of a free Blackberry smartphone from a representative of the local mayor. In 2009, the year in which the encounter took place, Blackberry smartphones had a particular cultural cache in Venezuela. As expensive and highly valued imported commodities, they were associated with the kind of North American-flavoured conspicuous consumption that might be found in the salubrious shopping malls located in the wealthiest zones of cities like Caracas and Valencia. But as a socialist community leader who hailed from the poor barrios of Valencia’s south – communities that are both geographically and symbolically far from such malls – the offer of the Blackberry constituted a moral hazard for Rafael. As he explains on Page 99:

I’d be really embarrassed to walk around with a phone like that, really embarrassed. To walk around with a tremendous telephone like that with the people who are with me – with where I’m from – I couldn’t do it.

Although tempted by the smartphone, Rafael eventually decides not to accept the offer, concluding that he’s better off with the simple cell phone he already used. In doing so, he’s able to “walk the walk” of socialist asceticism without feeling morally compromised. The scene captures precisely the kind of lived uncertainties that shaped the Bolivarian Revolution even in its most optimistic period. It also shows how the Venezuelan people experienced undercurrents of the political and economic tensions that would later spill over into a profound crisis under President Maduro.

Learn more about A Blessing and a Curse at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carlos Alberto Sánchez's "Blooming in the Ruins"

Carlos Alberto Sánchez is Professor of Philosophy at San José State University, where he teaches and publishes on Mexican philosophy and its history. He grew up in Michoacán, Mexico and King City, California. He is the co-founder and executive editor of the Journal of Mexican Philosophy.

Sánchez applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us toward the Good Life, and reported the following:

Page 99 is one of the culminating pages of Chapter 9, “Be Late to Parties,” which discusses the Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla’s views on punctuality. In this page, I summarize a quote from the previous page which, I claim, “could easily describe our current state of robotic hurriedness. It is the need to fulfill this value that we can blame for road rage, work-related injuries, and other time-related stresses.” This value is what Portilla calls “punctual being”— the idea is that we want to be punctual at whatever cost. I continue, “However, arriving on time once or a million times does not make me punctual in the sense that my very being, the way that I exist in the world, is itself punctual. There is more to life than being punctual— or generous, or trustworthy. Besides, tomorrow or the next day I may fail at being punctual, generous, or trustworthy. It is said, for instance, that in eighteenth- century Königsberg, Prussia, townsfolk would set their watches by the impeccable routines of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Year after year he would take his evening walk at the same exact time, so people knew what time it was when he passed by. But was he at one with punctuality? Had he achieved a “punctual being”? A day came in 1804 when he no longer passed by, when he was no longer punctual. Death made this so. Hence, the answer is no, he was not at one with punctuality. Ultimately, Kant was just a person with a good track record of having kept a strict routine. What this means is that a value, like punctuality, or generosity, or politeness, is only a guide for my actions, something that helps me make sense of and act on the world in which I live. Portilla says that one truly becomes punctual, or one completely fulfills the demands of the value of punctuality, only in retrospect. This is when all of my “on times” are collected into a memory of me, and the final verdict by those who knew me becomes ‘He was punctual.’”

Page 99 is a fairly good representation of the book as a whole. The book itself is meant to introduce readers to Mexican philosophy in a way that is neither technical or hard to grasp. And page 99 does this well. Each chapter is written in such a way that the philosophical idea expressed in an illustration (Kant’s punctuality here) that readers may find either amusing or familiar. Here, on this page, I try to mix the philosophical idea of punctuality with comments about how we all want to be on time but ultimately fail; how death is the only “on time” you’ll ever achieve, and so on.

I wouldn’t say that Blooming in the Ruins passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors. While it is a good representation of the tone of the book, the rest of the book contains many more stories and anecdotes that readers will appreciate, find amusing, or instructive. In other words, the book is even less technical than page 99 and much more so than any philosophy book that the reader may run into.

Visit Carlos Alberto Sánchez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue