Rory Nugent's "Down at the Docks"

Rory Nugent is an explorer and a writer. His books include The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck and Drums Along the Congo.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Down at the Docks, and reported the following:

While a true master, his prose a guide for all scribblers, Ford Madox Ford was dead-ass wrong commending page 99 as all a browser needs to ascertain the whole. Sure, any one page can offer up a fair sampling of tone and style and tempo; after all, each paragraph should be integral to the whole, and if not, well, the book is sure to leak like a poorly caulked scow. What Ford misses--indeed, what any reader flipping pages at random misses--is the force of the narrative. Character development is important. Plot is important. And craftsmanship is best exhibited over the course of a book, page one to the END. God help us--reader and writer alike--if the story stinks; we all feel duped and for different reasons. On the other hand, we all want to be taken on a journey offering up a tremendous pay-off for little cash up front. However, the only way to assay worth takes a lot more reading than a single page.

That said and astern, I gladly invite readers to take the Page 99 test when picking up my new book, Down at the Docks. The language is indicative of the whole, as is pacing and structure. And luckily, perhaps, this single page exemplifies what I tried to do throughout the book, layering it with history and using a single place (in this case, the fishing port of New Bedford, Massachusetts) as a mirror on the 300 year American passage from bottom of the heap to top of the pile.

Nowhere in America, wrote Herman Melville in Moby Dick, will you find more patrician-like houses, parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. But ever since the blossoming of the electronic age and out-sourcing, New Bedford has withered, a brick and mortar city filled with mill buildings which keep the fire department in work but few others. As always, fishing remains a vital industry in town. In fact, it's America's largest fishing port; however, its fleet is under seige by government rules and regulations and much from the past is going missing, just like cod.

Page 99 of Down at the Docks involves my man, Mako, a captain who feels he has been screwed by a bunch of sheriff deputies, lab coats and greenies who don't know jack about the sea. In his early days, he was a harpooner aboard a swordfish stick boat. A fish swims near him on his boat and reflexively, he reaches for Mister Sticker, his harpoon........

While javelins are made for throwing, harpoons are meant for thrusting. The user's power hand cusps the end of the wooden shaft, while the other hand guides the iron tip to the target, leaving arms and shoulders to do the work. As a weapon, it's effective only in close combat, which partly explains why so many New Bedford whalemen died on the job.It was normal for the harpooner to urge the oarsmen to climb up the back of the beast. He knew any distance beyond a few yards was useless to his cause; he needed to plunge the stick a foot or more into blubber. What chances the whale had to escape and/or turn its predators into prey disappeared after the introduction of bow-mounted harpoon guns in the late 1860s.

Closer, please, Mr. Fish, Mako whispers, and thumps the transom several times with Mister Sticker. In his days as a harpooner aboard a sword boat, he was known as one of the few white guys in the top tier of a trade dominated by men of color: red, black, brown and yellow. Traditionally, like Tashtego and Queequeg, the best in the business hailed from islands: Martha's Vineyard, Cabo Verde, the Azores and Samoa.

That's it, fishy, closer, Mako says, and prepares to launch. Hands at the grip points, the shaft goes tight to his right cheek and he puts his left foot forward, his legs bent at the knee. With the machine cocked, the veins in his arms start stretching their fabric and his eyes grow large, bulging in their sockets and showing lots of white. The shiner nears, and when the target darts leftward, Mako twists at the waist, following it. When, for a moment, the fish dives, he straightens. The fish accelerates, but he's already up to speed.

Mister Sticker barely raises a splash as it cuts through the water......

Learn more about the book and author at Rory Nugent's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barry Strauss' "The Spartacus War"

Barry Strauss is a professor of history and classics at Cornell University as well as the director and a founder of its Program on Freedom and Free Societies. His books include The Battle of Salamis, named one of the Best Books of 2004 by the Washington Post, and The Trojan War: A New History, a main selection of the History Book Club.

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

If you like two-fisted reconstructions of ancient battles, you’ll love page 99 of The Spartacus War. If you hate uncertainty, however, then you won’t be so sure. Page 99 packs all the grandeur and misery of writing a history of Spartacus into 300 words.

Rebel, gladiator, and slave, Spartacus is one of the most famous figures of the ancient world. He is also one of the most poorly documented. He and his 60,000 troops wreaked havoc on Roman Italy for two years but they left no records. The Romans, who won the war, told the story, but no complete contemporary Roman account survives. We have only fragments, so the story of Spartacus is a jigsaw puzzle missing many parts.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Spartacus was such a noble opponent that even the Romans were forced to admire him. That is intriguing in itself, which makes the historical detective work of studying Spartacus even more absorbing.

Page 99 imagines a battle in southeastern Italy between the Romans and a Celtic breakaway group from Spartacus’s army. The date was 82 B.C. We know little about the battle except its outcome and one detail about the fighting. In my reconstruction, scholarship mixes with the imagination to yield informed speculation.

Spartacus himself doesn’t appear on the page, nor does my extensive travel in Italy. I tromped around many of the war’s battlefields but not this one. A pity all that, but still, the page does give a taste of the book’s research.

Excerpt, p. 99:

Ancient battle lives in the imagination as a climax: a collision, followed by dozens of disorderly, individual fights that go on until one side prevails. Real battle was probably episodic. Like boxers, the two sides combined, broke apart, regrouped each in its own corner, and then hit each other again. Finally, one army would collapse and run. Such typical Roman battle lasted two to three hours, but episodes of hand-to-hand fighting probably each lasted only 15-20 minutes before exhaustion set in.

The only detail of the battle of Mount Garganus to survive is the report that the rebels “fought extremely fiercely”: a conventional statement but it might just be true. Celtic warriors were known for their ferocity and tenacity in battle. We might imagine the bravest legionaries circling around the enemy’s flank or trying to stab their way into the enemy lines. Eventually they succeeded, but probably at a price.

Read an excerpt from The Spartacus War, and learn more about the book and author at Barry Strauss' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wendy Moore's "Wedlock"

Wendy Moore is a writer and journalist. Her work has been published in a range of newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, the Observer and the British Medical Journal and has won several awards. Her first book, The Knife Man, was published to great critical acclaim.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, and reported the following:

As a British author, having published my book Wedlock both in the UK and US, the p. 99 test presents me with an enviable dilemma: I have two p. 99s to choose from.

Both refer rather pleasingly to a key theme in the story – sex and scandal – so content-wise the book certainly passes the p. 99 test. Stylistically, the American p. 99 probably best epitomises my efforts to combine narrative drive and historical fact as seamlessly as possible. And both pages, since they are relatively close together, describe a turning point in the plot at a crucial moment in the life of the main character.

Wedlock tells the story of Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore, whose first marriage to John Lyon, the 9th Earl of Strathmore, created the Bowes Lyon name. Her third son, Thomas, would become great-great-great-grandfather of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth. Born in 1749, the only daughter of an immensely wealthy coalowner in north-east England, Mary Eleanor enjoyed a pampered and privileged upbringing. When her father died in 1760, when she was 11, she became the richest heiress in Britain. Pursued by a bevy of suitors, at 18 she married the handsome but aloof Earl of Strathmore. It was not an ideal match and when he died, of TB, nine years later, Mary wept few tears.

By p. 99, or pp. 99s to be precise, Mary has reached a pivotal point in her life. A merry young widow, with a large fortune and five young children to consider, Mary has every chance of making a successful second marriage. Instead she becomes mired in sexual scandal and wrecks her chances of happiness. Having taken a lover just before her husband’s death, Mary has just discovered herself pregnant with her lover’s child. So p. 99 finds her in mourning costume, contemplating an abortion. Her account of her abortion attempts – not just once but four times – is a rare chronicle of such an event in history. But at this very same moment, a charming Irish adventurer, who calls himself ‘Captain’ Andrew Robinson Stoney, breezes into town on the lookout for a rich heiress to ensnare. Torn between two suitors, Mary makes a disastrous choice.

Read an excerpt from Wedlock, and visit Wendy Moore's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Beresford's "From Demons to Dracula"

Matthew Beresford is a freelance writer based in Chesterfield, Derbyshire in the UK.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his book From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, and reported the following:

Page 99 in my book is the first page of a chapter dedicated to the vampire within Eastern European folklore. Is it reflective of the book as a whole? In some ways, yes. It describes how travellers and returning soldiers brought back strange and macabre tales of the superstitious act of exhuming dead bodies that occurred throughout much of the later 17th and most of the 18th centuries. This act was a preventative method of vampirism: the reanimation of a dead corpse. Once exhumed, hearts were removed and heads were cut off suspected vampires before the remains were re-buried.

These tales and reports were the foundation for the later Gothic literature of Victorian England, culminating in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and subsequently the later stage and cinema productions of that mystical being, the vampire. But my book argues for a much deeper history for the modern vampire myth, and goes back some 6000 years in time to the spirits and demons of the Ancient World of Rome, Greece and Egypt, on through early funerary rites in the Prehistoric period and incorporates the Saxon and Viking Poems and Sagas and the plagues, superstitions and witch trials of the Middle Ages.

I investigate the truth behind the Historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler and look at ‘vampire hotspots’ such as Whitby and Highgate Cemetery in England, before finally examining the modern image within cinema, vampire crime, the Goth culture and vampire interest groups in an attempt to track how the modern vampire myth was created.

Learn more about the book and author at Mathew Beresford's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eve Pell's "We Used to Own the Bronx"

Eve Pell served as reporter and associate producer for three PBS documentaries: The Best Campaign Money Can Buy, which won a Columbia-DuPont award in 1992, Heartbeat of America, which won a Cine Golden Apple a year later, and The Battle Over School Choice. Her books include The Big Chill about the Reagan administration and Maximum Security on conditions in California prisons.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante, and reported the following:

On page 99 of We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante, I am dancing at the Plaza Hotel in New York City hotel wearing a long tulle evening dress. It's 1952, I am 15 years old, and I am learning the skills to be a social success in the WASP upper crust of which I am a junior member by virtue of having been born into an old, aristocratic family. There are more than a hundred teenagers there, all in formal dress, most of whom I do not know. We all--almost all--attend private day or boarding schools where we have no contact at all with the opposite sex, so we are fascinated and ignorant. At these events, girls are at the mercy of boys--they can choose partners but we can't. The women's movement doesn't exist; girls like me are trained to be pretty chameleons, pleasing to boys--with the ultimate goal, a few years down the road, of making a "good" marriage to a suitably rich and prominent gentleman.

...we were truly in the arena, a vast, high-ceilinged ballroom in the center of which stood a cluster of black-clad boys like a flock of penguins. Couples danced around the cluster, fox-trotting in the old-fashioned way....The challenge for girls was to get danced with by as many boys as possible; the goal was to be so entertaining that many boys would cut in on you several times a night. You could be discussing the poetry of T. S. Eliot with a studious one, then smile gracefully over his shoulder at the approach of another as he raised his hand to cut in. As the poetry student released you, you moved into the arms of the other boy--with whom you had previously been chatting about the Rangers' star hockey player....On a good night, I carried on a dozen interrupted conversations that way, several of them with boys I had never met before as I smiled, adjusting my brain and body to each new partner's style without missing a beat.

Fifteen years later, as a socialite housewife in San Francisco at the height of the 1960s, I couldn't bear that life any longer. Through a series of unexpected events, I jumped off the tracks and, leaving the life I had been brought up for, plunged into radical politics and more adventures than I could possibly have foreseen.

The Ghost Word blog gives a good account of the book.

Read an excerpt from We Used to Own the Bronx, and learn more about the book and author at Eve Pell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Beryl Satter's "Family Properties"

Beryl Satter is the author of Each Mind a Kingdom and the chair of the Department of History at Rutgers University in Newark.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a map of Chicago circa 1960, with areas containing black populations of 40% to 100% highlighted. The map also shows that there was an immense increase in the number of such areas since 1940. My book explains the forces behind this growing pattern of racial segregation – and who benefited financially from it.

Many people know about “redlining,” or banks’ widespread refusal to make mortgage loans to African-Americans, especially those moving to white neighborhoods. Many also know about “blockbusting” (real estate speculators would buy “low” from whites and sell “high” to blacks). What no one explains is how low-income blacks who couldn’t get mortgages could buy “high” from white speculators.

I learned the answer to this mystery when I read the papers of my father, Mark J. Satter, a Jewish attorney who, until his death in 1965, represented scores of black clients who’d been grossly overcharged for their properties. Most had bought homes “on contract,” or on the installment plan. My father learned from his clients that speculators were buying properties from whites at close to market value, and then selling them to blacks “on contract” at double to quadruple market value. Just as shocking were the terms of these sales. Contract buyers made down payments and were responsible for taxes, insurance, and maintenance. But if a contract buyer missed even one payment, the seller was free to evict the buyer – and keep everything the buyer had invested to that point.

The profits to the speculators were stunning. For example, one of my father’s clients bought a building for $9,950, from a speculator who had recently purchased it for $3500. His client had paid off $8,500 of that debt – plus another $2300 in improvements – when he was evicted. Approximately 85% of properties sold to black Chicagoans were sold “on contract” – and there were close to a million blacks in Chicago by the early 1960s. In 1958, my father charged that speculators were draining Chicago’s black community of $1 million dollars a day, and the evidence I’ve turned up supports his estimate.

The meaning of the map on p. 99 is best summed up by a self-described “middle-class Negro homeowner” who I quote the page before. “Face it!” he wrote in 1959. “Racial prejudice is profitable in Chicago. Every time a new parcel of land is added to the Bronze Ghetto, millions of dollars in real estate profits are made!”

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Pearl's "The Last Dickens"

Matthew Pearl is the New York Times bestselling author of The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow, and is the editor of the Modern Library editions of Dante’s Inferno (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest novel, The Last Dickens, and reported the following:

In recruiting Charles Dickens as a subject and a character in my novel, I wanted to explore his unique high wattage celebrity. The main thread of the book takes place in 1870 as an American publisher named James Osgood must search to find the ending to Dickens's last book in order to save his publishing firm and, ultimately, his own life. Interspersed are two sections that take place a few years earlier, late 1867-early 1868, when Dickens was touring the United States in a landmark reading tour.

Page 99 finds us in one of those "flashbacks" as Dickens and his entourage weave through American fans, ticket speculators and one relentless celebrity stalker. When I say "entourage" I mean it. Dickens brought along a dresser, in charge of each outfit Dickens wore, a ticket agent, a theatrical manager, a gas-lighting expert, and one or more unnamed assistants. In The Last Dickens, I've created a fictional member of the entourage, a young Irish porter named Tom Branagan, who becomes a protector. On page 99, Tom is contemplating the fame of his boss. "Tom had helped keep the onlookers away when Dickens had arrived at the Parker House; he was not surprised by their presence but by their persistence. A young woman yanked out a piece of fringe from Dickens's heavy gray and black shawl; a man excited to touch the novelist took the opportunity to pull a clump of fur from his coat."

With the rest of the entourage in denial, Tom suspects that one of the fans is out to harm Dickens, a suspicion which soon turns urgent. (The stalker plot is based on a real incident during the tour.) The chase for the stalker ultimately ties together with the intrigue surrounding the lost ending of Dickens's last novel.

Read an excerpt from The Last Dickens, and learn more about the author and his work at Matthew Pearl's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Poe Shadow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Greenberg's "The Least Worst Place"

Karen J. Greenberg is Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security, New York University School of Law. She is the editor of numerous books, including The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the well known Terrorist Trial Report Card which has tracked all US terrorism cases to go through the US courts since 9/11.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days, and reported the following:

When the first military unit at Guantanamo– Joint Task Force 160 - received the detainees, they looked over their captives, and soon realized that they knew next to nothing about the “worst of the worst” that they had been expecting. US authorities didn’t know the prisoners’ names or much else about them. Many had been handed over for bounty to US forces. Accordingly, the detainees arrived without “pocket litter” or papers. Translators prepared in Arabic turned out to be useless for the majority who spoke Pashto and Urdu. The detainees arrived with diseases, dietary requirements, and religious sensibilities unknown to the command staff on the ground at Guantanamo. Yet when the JTF asked that the International Committee of the Red Cross - the international organization best prepared to give professional advice on medical and other issues - be allowed to join them as required under international law for prisoners from a war zone, their request was denied by “higher-ups” in Washington. Finally, the uniformed military directly involved with Guantanamo bypassed Washington’s impasse and called in the ICRC. Only then did the 160 begin to know who they had in their midst and how best to interact with them. Only then could the 160 begin fully to understand how to legally and humanely go about attending to the detainees – goals which this first team considered themselves sworn as military men and women to uphold.

From Page 99:

The first thing the ICRC wanted to do was to interview each detainee. Setting up an open-air table within sight of the cages, the representatives began their questioning. If the ICRC representatives had had their way the detainees being interviewed would not have been shackled at all. But the JTF command structure was not about to allow anything that would expose the ICRC men to serious harm. A compromise was reached. Each detainee was seated in a chair facing a table at which the interviewers sat, asking their questions and taking notes. This afforded the shackled detainees a modicum of dignity.

Learn more about The Least Worst Place at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Singer's "The Life You Can Save"

Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than thirty books, including Animal Liberation, widely considered to be the founding statement of the animal rights movement, Practical Ethics, and One World: Ethics and Globalization.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, and reported the following:

The 99th page of The Life You Can Save is almost entirely taken up by a description of the work of Namlo International, a small aid organization founded by Magda King that helps rural villagers in developing countries to build and run schools.

The Life You Can Save presents an ethical argument for the view that we have an obligation to help those living in extreme poverty. I begin by drawing a parallel between our obligation to rescue a child from a shallow pond, at the cost of ruining one’s best shoes, and our obligation to rescue children in other countries who are dying from avoidable, poverty-related causes. I look at how much it really costs to save the life of one of those children, and conclude that it might not be so very different from the cost of a pair of expensive shoes. Yet most of us don’t give nearly that much to organizations seeking to help people out of poverty.

I then consider objections to the claim that we ought to be doing more to help those living in extreme poverty. Some of these objections are ethical, and others factual. One of the factual ones is that aid doesn’t work, and so there is nothing we can do for those living in extreme poverty. Part of my rebuttal of this objection is to describe many aid projects that do work, and this is the point made by my account of the work of Namlo International. It shows what can be achieved by relatively modest contributions to people in developing countries.

Someone applying Ford Madox Ford’s remark about judging a book by its 99th page would therefore get a very misleading impression of what The Life You Can Save is about. The reader who takes page 99 as representative of the book as a whole would expect a book full of descriptions of aid projects and the people who have started them. Neither the theme of the book nor its general mode of discussion is apparent from that single page.

Learn more about The Life You Can Save.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mario Acevedo's "Jailbait Zombie"

Mario Acevedo is the bestselling author of The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, X-Rated Bloodsuckers, and The Undead Kama Sutra. A former infantry and aviation officer, engineer, and art teacher to incarcerated felons, he lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.

He applied the “Page 99 Test”--Is Ford Madox Ford's statement "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you," accurate for your book?--to Jailbait Zombie, the latest Felix Gomez novel, and reported the following:

In the case of this book, you understand the skankness of the girl but there's nothing about zombies.

Page 99:

She rattled the pills in her pocket. “Another side effect of these is increased sex drive. Not that I needed an excuse. I was dying anyway so fucking was a good way to pass the time and make money. What was I waiting for? Usually it was better than watching television. Even with a scumbag like Barrett.”

“You slept with him?”

Phaedra gave a devilish laugh. “I never slept with anyone. But if you want to know, I didn’t have sex with Barrett. He paid me twenty dollars to look at my titties.”

“And that’s it?”

“No. I had to watch him jack off.” Phaedra put a charge in her voice like she took pleasure shocking me.

Which didn’t. Instead I pitied her. Her story explained the “allowance” money that had fallen out of her pocket. She was dying and traded her youthful innocence for fast, cheap thrills.

“Don’t look so sad,” she taunted. “I learned lots about sex and even more about the way the world works.”

“And your uncle Sal?” I hadn’t met the guy but I had already pegged him as a rat. If he abused Phaedra, this was another reason to hang him by his tail.

“Uncle Sal’s been good to me. Around him, I can pretend I’m not the family’s dirty secret. But my aunt Lorena, Sal’s wife, hates me. She sees the effect I have on men. She calls me the strega, witch.” Phaedra gave a grin that was both ironic and condescending. “I don’t know what makes my relatives more uncomfortable. That I’m dying of Huntington’s or that I know who among them is a child molester.”

“And Gino?”

“He’s been okay. Nothing happened between him and me. Besides Uncle Sal, Gino’s the only friend I’ve had in the family.”

“Does Gino know about your reputation as a strega?”

Browse inside Jailbait Zombie, and learn more about the author and his work at Mario Acevedo's website and his blog.

View the video trailer for Jailbait Zombie.

--Marshal Zeringue