Jim Endersby's "A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology"

Jim Endersby is a lecturer in the History Department at the University of Sussex. His first book, A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology, appeared last year (from William Heinemann in the UK, and Harvard University Press in the USA).

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the book and reported the following, beginning with most of page 99:

Lumpers and splitters

By the mid-nineteenth century, hawkweeds, brambles and dandelions were at the centre of a botanical war in which ‘lumpers’ faced off against ‘splitters’. These two factions brought two very different philosophies to bear on one of the most contentious scientific subjects of the day, the classification of life. In essence, they disagreed about how many kinds of living things there were in the world, an issue that was fundamental both to important scientific and religious questions.

Beginning with the discovery of America, European knowledge of the incredible diversity of the world’s animals and plants had been growing rapidly – and at an increasingly rapid pace. Initially, Europeans tried to fit the plants of the New World into the categories they had inherited from the ancient Greek authorities. For centuries, naturalists had been following in the tradition of authors like Pliny, compiling and writing commentary on ancient wisdom, but from the Renaissance onward Europeans were forced to recognize that there were more plants and animals in the world than even the wisest Greeks had dreamed of. These new plants and animals needed new names and new classifications. Within 100 years of Columbus’s arrival in America, the Cambridge Professor of Botany, John Ray, observed that while the ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus had recorded just 500 species of plants, his own Historia Plantarum Generalis contained 17,000 species.

It was largely because of this massive expansion of knowledge that – in the century after Ray’s book appeared – the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus carried out his massive reform of classification. Part of the trouble was that naturalists, botanists, farmers and florists all gave plants their own local names: H. auricula is not merely known as pale hawkweed, yellow hawkweed and yellow devil hawkweed, it is also known as kingdevil hawkweed and as the smooth (or in Connecticut, ‘smoothish’) hawkweed.

Is this representative of the book as a whole? Well, yes and no. It’s a bit dry compared to other pages – no jokes or anecdotes on this page, but it does give a flavour of the book. Each chapter is based around a plant or animal, starting with some kind of story about the organism itself – it might be its evolutionary history, the story of its interactions with people, its religious or cultural significance – each chapter is different. Page 99 is part of the chapter on Hieracium auricula, one of a group of flowers that look much like dandelions (and are often confused with them) and which, like dandelions, are annoying weeds that are hard to eradicate once they get into your lawn or your farmland. This page covers a topic that recurs throughout the book: how and why humans have classified the living world, how plants and animals got their names and why they got them. The chapter is subtitled, ‘what Mendel did next’, and concerns the use that was made of hawkweeds by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel (although, as I point out in the book, he was – strictly speaking – a German-speaking Moravian friar). This chapter takes up the story of how we came to understand biological inheritance, by showing what Mendel did and – even more importantly – what he didn’t do. He did not, for example, discover the basic laws of genetics, even though he is routinely credited with having done just that.

My intention in telling the story in this rather eccentric, roundabout way, was to get away from kind of history of science that presents the past as a succession of lone geniuses whose brilliant ideas led us gradually onward and upward to the truth. By looking at the animals and plants, I hope to show that science is as much about hard work as it is about brilliant ideas. And by making the organisms the heroes of the chapters, and introducing the people as characters in the organism’s stories, I hope to show that science is always collaborative, always about cooperation (or sometimes competition) between groups of people. Lone geniuses are very rare indeed.

Read an excerpt from A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Learn more about the author and his research and other publications at Jim Endersby's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Graves' "The Book of Old Houses"

Sarah Graves lives in Eastport, Maine, where her "Home Repair Is Homicide" mystery novels are set.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to the latest novel in the series, The Book of Old Houses, and reported the following:

"...Bob Arnold was an unlikely-looking cop, with a round body that nevertheless was able to move very fast, a pink face whose deceptively mild expression had been the downfall of many a crook, and unemphatic blue eyes that failed to hint at the sharp mental machinery behind them."

That's the first paragraph on page 99 of The Book of Old Houses. Next, sleuth Jake Tiptree tries to persuade Bob to keep an eye on a mysterious visitor whose links to a strange old book may include having committed murder for it.

Or maybe someone else did, either to get the book or while under its uncanny influence. After all, the volume is written in --

You guessed it. But can you guess the rest?

I think not, actually. Meanwhile as for page 99's quality being revelatory, I tend to believe each page probably has its hands full just managing to reveal its own goodness or badness, never mind the whole book's. So if it does an even halfway decent job of that I'm generally satisfied with it.

Read an excerpt from The Book of Old Houses and learn more the author and her books at Sarah Graves' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward G. Lengel's "To Conquer Hell"

Edward G. Lengel is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books on military history, including General George Washington: A Military Life. A recipient, with the Papers of George Washington documentary editing project, of the National Humanities Medal, he has made frequent appearances on television documentaries and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918, and reported the following:

Page 99 of To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918, begins with a grisly episode from September 26th, the first day of the battle:

“Another captured German soldier approached a group of Americans begging for water. ‘In reply,’ said a witness, ‘one of the men put a revolver to the German’s head and shot him through the temple.’”

War is capable of brutalizing the best of men. Americans, like soldiers from every other nation, sometimes committed atrocities in the heat of battle; and the fighting in the Meuse-Argonne was hotter than anything the Doughboys had ever seen. Page 99 continues:

“A lieutenant, a sergeant, and four privates from this regiment cleared a network of barbed wire defenses and moved over the crest of a knoll when the fog lifted. An automatic rifle opened fire on them from a clump of bushes ahead, and ‘as if by prearranged signal, enemy machine guns, automatics and snipers located in trees, gullies, and bushes ahead and on the flanks, opened with a hot fusillade which filled the air with snaps, cracks and whines of flying lead. Cut weeds, flying gravel and the harsh cracks of the bullets were proof enough that the patrol had located the resistance — and were in a bad trap.’ The sergeant fell, shot through the head; two privates were hit in the legs and another in the stomach. The lieutenant, carrying his revolver and two grenades, slithered through the mud and rolled into a shell hole, wondering how he had survived. ‘When the helmet rings with the cracks of ‘close ones’ and bits of flying gravel play a tattoo,’ he later explained, ‘one just naturally feels weak in the stomach and expects everything to suddenly turn black.’”

To Conquer Hell is about the Doughboys, and how they experienced and were transformed by what remains, with 26,000 dead, the bloodiest battle in American history. Utilizing hundreds of published and unpublished first-hand accounts, I describe how men from all over the United States overcame abysmal training, inadequate equipment, and sometimes incompetent generalship to crack one of the strongest German defensive systems in France and appreciably hasten the end of the First World War. The final chapter describes how the veterans returned home and attempted to readjust to civilian society. Some succeeded. Many didn’t.

In telling this story from the point of view of individual Doughboys, I am careful to avoid generalizing about their feelings and value judgments about the war. It would be all too easy to toss out narratives that don’t fit in with certain pre-conceived notions of what war is supposed to be like, although many historians of this and other wars have done so. Instead, I treat each soldier’s testimony with equal respect, finding that each man carried his experiences of the Meuse-Argonne in a unique way. My sole purpose in To Conquer Hell has been to tell the Doughboys’ stories, and to keep them alive in America’s historical memory.

Learn more about To Conquer Hell at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jana Richman's "The Last Cowgirl"

Jana Richman is the author of the memoir Riding in the Shadows of Saints: A Woman's Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail and her first novel, The Last Cowgirl.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to the debut novel and reported the following:

The quality of the whole will be revealed ... In a novel, I would have to say the quality of the whole largely depends on three elements: intriguing characters, a compelling story, and good writing. Does page 99 of The Last Cowgirl give a representative sample of each?

On page 99, Dickie Sinfield, the main character and narrator of the story, returns to the newsroom at The Beehive Banner, a Mormon church-owned daily where she is a journalist, after hearing about her brother’s death from an accident at the U.S. Army’s nerve gas incinerator located in Utah’s west desert — also the location of the small ranch where Dickie grew up. We find out a little bit about her in the opening paragraph as she walks through the unusually quiet newsroom into her editor’s office:

Charlie and I had been hired at the paper within weeks of each other twenty-five years ago and had gravitated toward each other as outcasts tend to do. I was the most radical apostate the church had ever hired ... and Charlie was one of about ten African-American Mormons in the entire state at the time...

Although Charlie has given her time off, Dickie is intent on finding out exactly what happened at the incinerator the day her brother, Heber, died. She knows from past experience that the Army will not offer up information without a fight, and she’s hoping Charlie will help her wage that fight. As is her style, Dickie hides her pain behind sarcasm and a tough exterior:

“What the hell’s wrong with everybody out there?” I ask. “I can’t be the first person to have a death in the family.”

“No, but I’m pretty sure you’re the first to have one killed by nerve gas.”

“That doesn’t make me toxic — although growing up in Ganoa County might.”

From page 99, we do get a glimpse of Dickie’s character, but we get an awfully narrow view of the story itself. Although the relationship between the U.S Army and the west desert ranchers is an integral part of the story, it is not a good representation of the whole, which is about love, loss, passion, regret, and our relationship to the geography around us. As for the “good writing” criteria, I’ll leave that up to the readers.

Read an excerpt from The Last Cowgirl and learn more about the novel from the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Glenda E. Gilmore's "Defying Dixie"

Glenda E. Gilmore is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. A North Carolina native, she writes extensively on Southern history.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950, and reported the following:

Defying Dixie is about those people in the South who opposed segregation and white supremacy from 1919 though 1950 and who paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. The first third of the book focuses on Communists, who stood almost alone in espousing integration, social equality, and full political rights for African Americans in the 1920s and early 1930s. It's not easy to write compellingly about the details of Communism theory on the ground in the South. The records were secret, people used aliases, and they changed approaches and revised organizations based on national and international policies. I used the Soviet archives in Moscow and matched that information to local southern sources. Page 99 is about the nuts and bolts of Communist organizing in the South and why black southerners joined the party. It's more organizational and less personal than most of the narrative because it documents a change in Communist policy toward organizing African Americans. Page 99 uses local stories to illustrate international politics and introduces human characters to exemplify complicated political ideas. To answer Ford Madox Ford, it's representative, but it's not comprehensive.

Page 99:

over some commercial transaction.¹ Moreover, poor black transients looking for work often found themselves accused of crimes by people they had never met in places they had only visited. The Communists realized that white southerners used the criminal justice system to enforce their political economy. Lynching a black man taught other black men to stay in their places at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Organizing around issues such as lynching helped bring southern African Americans into the Party. When Otto Hall left Gastonia he traveled to Baltimore, Atlanta, Richmond, Birmingham and throughout North Carolina. He hoped to turn radical pre-existing black organizations into American Negro Labor Congress chapters.² At the close of 1929, the ANLC had forty-six locals, including twelve in the South, an amazing increase over the five northern locals it had had when the Gastonia strike began. The next year, “for the first time in the five years’ history of the A.N.L.C. since its founding in Chicago in 1925, a delegation came from the South.” Hall had succeeded where Lovett Fort-Whiteman had failed.³

New ANLC branches should have furnished black CP members to integrated Party units, but getting the local white Party members to accept black people proved a difficult task. For example, in Norfolk, Virginia, Party members were Jewish small businessmen who conducted meetings in Yiddish. A young white Communist organizer built a union among black women who worked in a bedspring factory there, only to be charged with a violation of Virginia’s law against “conspiracy to incite the colored population to insurrection against the white population.”⁴ Moreover, he reported, the local Jewish Communists adopted an “open antagonistic attitude towards Negro Comrades.” The practice of interracial Communism proved too much for the Jewish members, who feared their own arrests would come next. They voted to “disband the branch in the face of all the terror.” The Party called them “petty-bourgeois elements” and expelled them.⁵ The Party had to impress the Negro Policy’s importance on their white members.

The interracial League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) was a step in that direction. It replaced the all-black American Negro Labor Congress with an organization that would be “more broad and all-inclusive,” and include “white workers standing on the program of Negro Liberation.”⁶ By the end of 1931, ferreting out racism in the Party

Read an excerpt from Defying Dixie and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Microtrends" by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne

Mark Penn is worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller and President of Penn, Schoen and Berland. E. Kinney Zalesne is a former White House Fellow, Counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno, and was president and executive vice president of two national social-change organizations, College Summit and Hillel.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, and reported the following:

Page 99 wraps up the 20th microtrend -- of 75 -- in Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes. This chapter is about America’s Hard-of-Hearers – the nearly 30 million people (up from just 12 million in the early 70s) who strain to hear, or miss out on sounds entirely.

It’s a classic microtrend: Americans are largely focused on myopia, but it fact deafness is the hot new sensory malfunction. And more pointedly, the rise in Hard-of-Hearers has huge, untapped implications for business and policy. Look for deafness-related innovations -- like bionic ear processor implants that run on a 15-year battery, or antioxidant drugs that protect cells in the inner ear – to take off in the stock market. Look for a public health campaign against noise (assuming advocates can get over the challenge of being heard in Washington without shouting). And look for more revolutionary inventions: both the telephone and the Internet were actually invented by men who were trying to improve their communication with their deaf wives.

We like Page 99 as a solid sample page of Microtrends – on it or almost any other page, you can grasp a new, under-the-radar but growing group of people in America who, by virtue of their circumstances and/or passions, are reshaping our nation. Office Romancers. Working Retired. Pro-Semites. Protestant Hispanics. Impressionable Elites. Long Attention Spanners. Caffeine Crazies. XXX Men. In the 75 groups, you will see yourself, your friends, your family, and your co-workers. And you will get a better understanding of how society works and where it’s going.

The big picture, from the microtrends, is that America is niching out into small, intense groups. But what sustains them all is an increasingly common set of values around tolerance and respect. That’s our strength and our challenge as a nation: we can meet the needs of more and more people, but only if we recognize that what makes that possible is the shared understanding that there’s more than one way to be an American.

Read an excerpt from Microtrends and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aimee Bender's "Willful Creatures"

Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and Willful Creatures. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and she has received two Pushcart prizes.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Willful Creatures and reported the following:

So, page 99 of Willful Creatures -- it's not all that representative, but maybe in an unexpected way it is. It's close to the climactic moment in a story where a woman has stumbled upon a store that carries words, made out of solids, liquids and gases. Page 99: they (she and the shop owner) enter the gas room, and it appears to be empty. Turns out the woman who runs the store has an elaborate explanation about how she has made the gases into words. So maybe, since this could be interpreted as a metaphor for the idea of writing, and the book is a book of writing, it's absolutely representative. Sometimes, the concept of writing, to me, feels a whole lot like making gas into words. Something less tangible into something more tangible. Like grabbing at air.

Also there's a silver key which reminds me of Bluebeard stories, and all fairy tales like that one are a guiding force when I sit down to write.

Read an excerpt from Willful Creatures and learn more about the author and her work at Aimee Bender's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Harvard Sitkoff's "King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop"

Harvard Sitkoff is a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire and the author or editor of more than eight books, including A New Deal for Blacks; The Struggle for Black Equality, 1945–1992; and A History of Our Time.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop, and reported the following:

My page 99 is the end of a four-page description and analysis of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which I consider one of the most cogent and eloquent American political writings. It is King at his best: violating a court injunction (an unjust law is no law at all); going to jail (by accepting imprisonment in order to arouse the community over its injustice, you were expressing the highest respect for law); refuting charges of being an “outside agitator” (Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere); defending his “extremism” and tactics of nonviolent direct-action civil disobedience (We have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.... We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed); explaining why African Americans should not be patient with injustice (Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation); and scorching the moderates or gradualists (I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block is not the White Citizen Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice).

The King of my book is no mere dreamer and apostle of love. He is a fighter for change. And the Movement he helped lead did, indeed, change the legal status of African Americans, usher in significant political change, and undermine a way of life built on ingrained racial discrimination and segregation.

Learn more about King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

José Ramón Sánchez's "Boricua Power"

José Ramón Sánchez is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Urban Studies at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He is also the Chair of the National Institute for Latino Policy.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his 2007 book Boricua Power: A Political History of Puerto Ricans in the United States, and reported the following:

I grapple with explaining power in this book. How do people get others to do things? Why do others comply? Puerto Ricans are a good case study for these questions because so much research and popular thinking has characterized this Latino community as one of the poorest and weakest in the U.S. I show that, contrary to popular thinking, there have been moments when Puerto Ricans have amassed power. More importantly, I show that these moments cannot be explained by traditional theories of power.

This chapter analyzes the Puerto Rican experience with power in the post-World War period in New York City. On this page, I remind the reader of the overall theme of the book. I explain power as an unstable product of the interactions between people. Power, in this sense, is less a thing and more a movement. It is a dance, the intersection of people driven by passions and interests with people who have the ability to satisfy them. It is within that engagement or dance that people gain the ability to move and to be moved, to act and to resist, to lead and to follow. Money or weapons, in this sense, do not create power. They can make power possible for those who possess them, but only if other people need or desire money in one or fear injury and death if a weapon is used in the other. Money loses value. Desires differ and change. Some people fear death. Some don’t. These changes and differences shift power, making it fundamentally unstable and fluid.

Though this chapter explains how the Puerto Rican community in New York City was able to gather political power, I suggest on this page that power actually does not exist so neatly compartmentalized into political, economic, and cultural boxes. I write “these dimensions of life are both too tangled together and too omnipresent for one to always dominate. It is the gravity of the relationship at particular moments that gives any of these dimensions the special ability to pull and push bodies across the social plane and expose its power.” Puerto Ricans in the post WW Two era gathered political power but not because they voted or had good political organizations. They simply became more valuable as cheap labor to local New York City industries and important examples of capitalist freedom in the emerging Cold War politics between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Changed economic need for Puerto Rican labor and superpower political interests thus created the gravitational forces that resulted in political power for Puerto Ricans in this period.

Read more about Boricua Power at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Eyre Ward's "Forgive Me"

Amanda Eyre Ward is the award-winning author of How to Be Lost and Sleep Toward Heaven.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest novel Forgive Me, and reported the following:

Oh, man, this is hard. This reminds me of my college application essay where we had to write page 137 of our autobiography and I did my level best to make sure that was the page where I mentioned how much my parent’s divorce had strengthened me and how I was the only girl in AP Physics.

On page 99 of Forgive Me, a young boy who loves to sing Sinatra meets a creepy man named Malcon who tells him he’s going to be a star. Although much of the book takes place in South Africa, and involves murder and motherhood, I think this page does reflect the tone of the novel, which is both sad and hopeful. I think this is what I always write about: how the saddest thing in the world is a hopeful person, and vice-versa. To hope for joy takes so much courage.

Page 99 is in the first person voice of the little boy. I had written much of the novel before I heard his voice, and at first, I had no idea who he was. I was in a hotel room in San Francisco, and I heard this voice say, “Today I was discovered.” I started writing on the hotel pad with the hotel pen, and I didn’t stop for some time.

Richard Hugo writes about “the triggering town.” He says, “You found the town, and now you must start the poem. If the poem turns out good, the town will have become your hometown no matter what name it carries.”

On Page 93, I began writing about this boy, my “triggering boy.” By page 99, I loved him.

Read an excerpt from Forgive Me and learn more about the author and her writing at Amanda Eyre Ward's website.

--Marshal Zeringue