Nancy D. Campbell's "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose"

Nancy D. Campbell is Professor and Head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is the author of Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice; Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research; and coauthor of The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America's First Prison for Drug Addicts and Gendering Addiction: The Politics of Drug Treatment in a Neurochemical World.

Campbell applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose, and reported the following:

Appearing on page 99 is a hand-drawn figure used by Milton Helpern, Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, for a 1972 paper titled “Fatalities from Narcotic Addiction in New York City: Pathologic Circumstance and Pathologic Findings.” That page recounts Helpern’s talk before the British Society for the Study of Addiction in London. Helpern drew attention to the social and economic changes that catalyzed the increase of heroin-related deaths among youth from urban communities of color in New York City. This graph starkly illustrates the increase in such deaths from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, a time when New York Center was the epicenter of overdose in the United States.

OD is a history of the present. Page 99 is crucial to the historical tale, as these deaths became “endemic,” the grounds from which the late 20th and early 21st century overdose epidemic grew. Readers are advised to keep calm, carry on, and carry naloxone. Naloxone or Narcan^TM itself emerges as a central character on page 100. In 1972, when the page 99 chart was made, naloxone had just been FDA approved and was in the process of being phased into ORs and ERs for reversing overdose.

Naloxone gradually displaced its predecessor, nalorphine or Nalline^TM, which the book recounts was used by police to detect if someone had recently used heroin by measuring pupil response. Let’s extend the page 99 test to pages 199 and 299. Don’t be intimidated—the book tells a big story but is punctuated by 40 illustrations ranging from ad campaigns by the Scottish Drugs Forum and NYC Health to ‘zine collages from the early overdose prevention that grew out of AIDS activism and needle exchange.

“Resuscitating Society: Overdose in Post-Thatcherite Britain” begins on page 199. This chapter recounts a very different history of overdose in a nation that maintained a cadre of “therapeutic addicts” via the so-called British System, and thus did not experience the influx of “nontherapeutic addicts” until later than the United States. Plus the UK infused harm reduction throughout the National Health Service. Scotland and Wales implemented the world’s first National Naloxone Programmes in “Trainspotting” country.

Page 299 occurs in the last chapter, “Overdose and the Politics of Redemption,” which argues that the life-and-death politics of naloxone have rendered it a “technology of solidarity.” After decades of proven effectiveness in emergency medicine, harm reduction activists wrenched naloxone out of medical hands and distributed it to drug users themselves and people likely to witness an overdose.

Getting naloxone into the hands of those who need it most took decades of dedication to harm reduction—to change law and policy, produce “proof of concept” and evidence, and build organizational infrastructure. The book captures the spirit of harm reduction because its author became a partisan. As argued in conclusion, “Harm reduction is a broad approach that may be adapted to prevent many kinds of social suffering through close attention to people, places, and things that matter. Starting from what matters most, change the world to reduce harms that we know well.”

Learn more about OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose at the MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas Daly's "Ruritania"

Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has also taught at Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, and Trinity College Dublin. His publications include Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siecle (1999), Literature, Technology and Modernity (2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009), and The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (2015). He edited Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel for Oxford World's Classics, and he is completing a new edition of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda.

Daly applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Ruritania: A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my Ruritania: A Cultural History, is a full-page illustration, showing an advertising postcard for a stage adaptation of George Barr McCutcheon’s 1901 romantic bestseller, Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne. It shows a scene in which the American hero, Grenfall Lorry, clad in a splendid military uniform, kneels to kiss the hand of Princess Yetive, the ruler of the fictional European kingdom of Graustark.

In this case the page 99 test might not give a reader all they need to get a sense of the overall project. The various versions of Graustark are important for the book, but most readers would need a little more context to recognize Graustark as the most successful American example of the “Ruritanian romance”, a formula for popular novels, plays, musicals, and films, which flourished between the 1890s and WWII. The book charts the rise and decline of Ruritania and suggests some reasons for its popularity.

The “Ruritanian romance” comes from Anthony Hope’s bestseller of 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda, in which the English hero visits the somewhat behind-the-times Germanic statelet of Ruritania, where he has to impersonate the king in order to foil a coup. Through daring and a strong sword arm our hero prevails, but when he falls for the king’s fiancée, Princess Flavia, he must choose between love and honour. Inspiring stage, film, radio, and television adaptations, and even its own board game, Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda was also the model for countless stories by other authors, in which ordinary heroes and heroines find royal romance and swashbuckling adventure in chocolate-box kingdoms such as Alasia, Hohenwald, Sylvania, and Wallaria. On both sides of the Atlantic mistaken identity, court pageantry, and plenty of swordplay, characterize the genre, which attracted talents as diverse as Edgar Rice Burroughs, P.G. Wodehouse, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Writers in other forms, from detective stories (Margery Allingham’s Sweet Danger) to science fiction (Robert A. Heinlein’s Double Star) have also borrowed elements of the formula.

At different times versions of Ruritanian have underpinned operettas and musicals (Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince, the Marx Brothers Duck Soup), Cold War comedies (The Mouse that Roared), and young adult fiction (The Princess Diaries). In the last few years, the formula has been dusted off a for a whole slew of made-for-TV Christmas movies, set in tinsel Ruritanian territories with names like Castlebury and Belgravia, including A Princess for Christmas (2011) and The Princess Switch (2018).

Though their originals are not as familiar as they once were, versions of Ruritania and Graustark may be with us for some time yet, chaneling both our lingering fascination with royalty, and the escapism of the pocket kingdom.

Follow Nick Daly on Twitter, and read more about Ruritania: A Cultural History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eugenia Lean's "Vernacular Industrialism in China"

Eugenia Lean (林郁沁) is a scholar of modern Chinese history, history of science, technology and industry, and affect studies. She received her BA from Stanford (1990) and her MA and PhD (1996, 2001) from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

She is the author of Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (2007), she examines a sensational crime of female passion to document the political role of sentiment in the making of a critical urban public.

Lean applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940, and reported the following:

One of the main goals of page 99 in Vernacular Industrialism in China is to historicize recipes for manufacturing cosmetics in domestic quarters that appeared in women’s magazines in 1915 China. Even though these early-twentieth-century recipes employed unprecedented chemical language, called upon reader/practitioners to utilize modern scientific apparatus, and argued for modernizing manufacturing processes, the understanding of chemical reactions and rich manufacturing practices had a much longer history. Page 99 illustrates this history by quoting from the eighteenth-century Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber. With few extant historical sources about domestic production of cosmetics from the early modern era, the study uses a literary source. To be sure, while a fictional text does not directly reflect social reality, it can be suggestive of vibrant domestic production and knowledge of chemical processes as authors of late imperial Chinese fiction often drew from daily encyclopedias sold to householders that include such knowledge as they wrote their novels.

An excerpt of the discussion on page 99, reads as follows:

The novel describes in detail how cosmetics are to be made, and this information coincides with encyclopedias from the period that include such manufacturing know-how. In chapter 44, Baoyu comforts the character Patience after she is caught in a lovers’ squabble between her mistress, her mistress’s husband, and his lover. …To console her Baoyu offers to make up her face. He insists on using the best makeup available in the residence and on sitting her at a dressing table, and he explains how the various powders are made in order to demonstrate their purity and quality.

Pinching off one of these novel powder-containers, [Baoyu] handed it to Patience.

“There you are. This isn’t ceruse, it’s a powder made by crushing the seeds of garden-jalap and mixing them with perfume.”

Patience emptied the contents of the tiny phial on her palm. All the qualities required by the most expert perfumers were there: lightness, whiteness with just the faintest tinge or rosiness, and fragrance.…

“This is made from safflower, the same as ordinary rouge,” Baoyu explained to her, “only the stuff they sell in the shops is impure and its color is inferior. This is made by squeezing the juice from the best quality safflower, carefully extracting all the impurities, mixing it with rose water, and then further purifying it…

Baoyu’s explanation of extracting impurities, mixing in rose water and further purifying the rouge follows (step-by-step) instructions on how to make rouge that appear in a seventeenth-century compendium on industrial technologies titled The Works of Heaven and the Inception of Things. Recipes that appear in 1915 women’s journals, the main concern of the chapter in which page 99 appears, echo the The Works of Heaven entry as well.

As a history of technology and industry in modern China, Vernacular Industrialism in China examines unconventional, ad hoc and curious forms of manufacturing and engagement with science in the early twentieth century. In an era when conditions for industry building were bleak and state support was scarce, some of this unexpected engagement led to the building of nativist industry. Some assumed other social and cultural functions including the formation of taste or the fostering of patriotic sentiment in an era of a buy- and manufacture-native goods campaign. As science and industry were not yet formally established, those who were curious often sought knowledge about industry and related sciences such as chemistry in unlikely sources, including how-to columns and even fiction and poetry. They drew from translated recipes and from domestic materia medica and manufacturing traditions. Some, including the main figure featured in the book, maverick industrialist Chen Diexian (1879-1940), tinkered with unconventional materials to source raw material locally, translated recipes to copy and adapt foreign technologies with the goal of “improvement” (rather than inventing anew), and shared brand formulas, domestic and international, as “common knowledge” needed for building nativist industry in newspapers. This kind of unusual yet resourceful, “do-it-yourself” approach toward building industry presages some of the manufacturing activities that have fueled China’s ascent as an economic powerhouse today.

With its focus on a fictional text from an earlier period, page 99 provides historical context for the modern period, but does not completely convey the multi-faceted nature of vernacular industrialism that is explored in the full study. Yet, the page does exhibit the sensibility of the book. With its examination of an unexpected source – a classical novel – as a means to understand practices of making and producing, page 99 reflects the unconventional approach the study takes overall – one that examines the seemingly frivolous, ad hoc practices and forms of knowledge production that were nonetheless often crucial in the making of modern industry in China.

Visit Eugenia Lean's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Walker Robins's "Between Dixie and Zion"

Walker Robins is lecturer in history at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts. His work has been published in the Journal of Church and State, Journal of Southern Religion, Baptist History & Heritage Journal, and Israel Studies.

Robins applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel, and reported the following:

In the true spirit of the test, here’s page 99 of Between Dixie and Zion without any context:

…the conflict, which Britain hoped to settle by dividing the land. Creasman was not optimistic about partition; Jews and Arabs alike wanted all of Palestine, so the plan was unlikely to succeed.

After that 1938 issue, Creasman continued to foreground the conflict in her program materials. Even the 1940 issue titled “To the Jew First,” which was focused specifically on Jewish evangelism, included a description of the Arab perspective in its program materials on Palestine—a sharp divergence from the pre-1937 issues. After noting that “we find ourselves wishing that Palestine could once more belong exclusively to the Jews,” she wrote, “we must remember that the Arabs have lived in the land for many centuries and consider it their national home.” Britain had made promises to Arabs and Jews alike. Beyond pointing to those promises, Creasman wrote in 1944 that World War I had unleashed a new “spirit of nationalism,” a “new enthusiasm for democracy,” and an “atmosphere of progress” in the region. Through their unfulfilled promises, though, the Great Powers had failed to capitalize on these developments after the war. Creasman hoped that similar mistakes would not be repeated after the Second World War.

Whatever Palestine’s political fate would be, for Creasman and the WMU—as for the authors of the graded mission study series—Christ remained Palestine’s only hope. “When the Jews receive their rejected Messiah, when the Arabs realize that full salvation can be found in the cross of Christ,” Creasman wrote in 1938, “then will Jesus come again to Palestine bringing peace and good will to the peoples of this land.” She repeated much the same wish in every article or lesson dealing with the region. In one issue, Royal Service even suggested visualizations. In Mrs. Charles Mullins’s 1944 instructions for the BWCs, she advised leaders to make a display featuring a map of Palestine that was torn and stretched, “as if it were being pulled apart.” “At the left of the map paste a picture of a Jewish scroll,” she suggested, “at the right a Mohammedan mosque, beneath a swastika, above a cross.” The display was to read “Who will win Palestine?” The expectation and hope, clearly, was that the cross would triumph.

Conclusion

As mentioned, part of the value in viewing the program materials in Royal Service lay in seeing how program editors Elizabeth Brower Nimmo and, especially, Myrtle Robinson Creasman interpreted the sometimes divergent materials produced by other Baptists. How, for example, did Creasman integrate new material like the graded mission study series into her programming on Palestine? How did she reconcile seemingly contradictory…

I have to say — page 99 provides a surprisingly good window into the wider work! Or at least one part of it. Overall, Between Dixie and Zion looks at how Southern Baptists encountered the Holy Land in the decades leading up to the establishment of Israel, when Arabs and Jews were struggling for control of British-ruled Palestine. Part of its argument is that how Southern Baptists encountered Palestine went a long way in determining what they thought about it. The individual chapters of the book are organized according to the different types of encounter (there are chapters on Arab Baptists, Jewish converts, foreign missionaries, and even Harry Truman, among others). Page 99 falls in a chapter called “Auxiliaries,” which looks at how the Woman’s Missionary Union (the Southern Baptist body tasked with educating the Baptist public on mission fields) presented Palestine in their monthly magazine, Royal Service. This chapter is somewhat unique for reasons laid out at the bottom of page 99—the editors of Royal Service were not just presenting their own perspectives but integrating the sometimes-divergent materials produced by other Southern Baptists. The interrupted question at the bottom of the page points to the key question of the chapter—how did the editors reconcile sometimes-contradictory interpretations of the conflict in Palestine? The answer, unstated but demonstrated on Page 99, is that they tended to mush these interpretations together rather than play them against each other (you can see this in the first full paragraph of the page).

At the same time, Page 99 does not hit other main argument of the book—that, irrespective of their particular religious or political leanings, Southern Baptists consistently drew orientalist contrasts between Jews and Arabs, identifying the Zionists with the “civilized West” over and against the Palestinian Arabs, whom they identified as part of a “backward East.” While few Southern Baptists were supportive of Zionism during this time, those that did support the movement were able to seize on these widespread impressions in making the case for it.

Learn more about Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Isaac Ariail Reed's "Power in Modernity"

Isaac Ariail Reed is associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies is the first page of the Introduction to Part II of the book. It launches a shift in the text, from the theorizations of power that made up part I to the problem of grasping something new about transitions to modernity in the Atlantic World in the 17th and 18th centuries. It reads, in part:

If I am allowed what has been said so far, in the speech genre of social theory, caught up as it is between the abstract and the general, certain aspects of the historical formation of the present come into sharper view… When power formations falter or run up against other ways of organizing high politics; when violence breaks out, and state violence is mobilized to quell violence with more violence; when rebel leaders must find ways to send and bind those under them, despite the uncertainty of troubled times; then we see the articulation of the underlying cognitive, moral, and aesthetic orders that render politics possible; we see the performing-into-being of new power configurations as contested solutions to problems of rule bequeathed by older configurations, which themselves some choose to defend in new terms.

And then later: “Liminality reveals regime.”

Does the test work? In part. The writing—declarative but overwrought, intense but also a bit precious—is probably good preparation for the rest of the work. If you like it, you’ll like the book. If you hate it… well, good luck if it is assigned to you in your graduate seminar. Of course, I just think it is true.

Page 99 also expresses the book’s preference for conceptual method over certain kinds of methodological fetishism, and it certainly represents well the historicizing ambitions that Power in Modernity harbors for the social sciences. It also reveals a certain old-fashioned affinity I have for Michel Foucault that is perhaps counterintuitive, given my findings about, and interpretations of, early modern English/British North America, the early American republic, and the French Revolution. I disagree, fiercely, with certain Foucauldian hypotheses about power in modernity, but adore, deeply to the point of failed imitation, Dr. Foucault’s ambition to combine high theory and historical detail.

What appears as a minor phrase on this page—“rebel leaders must find ways to send and bind those under them”—in fact encompasses and references a central obsession of the book: the delegation of tasks to agents, and the power relations that are forged thereby. One might then say that the reader of page 99 is not well prepared by that page in particular to understand what I mean by “regime”: long, overlapping chains of delegation, exclusion from these chains, and the representation of both of these in culture.

Furthermore, page 99—which is not a full page, given the heading—does not do much to introduce a central theme of Part II, namely that the “King’s Two Bodies,” understood as a cultural trope rather than a legal doctrine, constituted a remarkably practical way to tie together hierarchies built in the pursuit of various projects-in-the-world. Nor does this page use the vocabulary introduced in part one as part of a new theory of power—rector, actor, other.

Despite these misses, however, the page does give the impression of an author who seeks to inherit a variety of classic works in the human sciences on power, and yet also needs to reach for (though perhaps fail to find) something “reconfigured”—that is, something new. In this way, page 99 genuinely represents my inner life when I began to write up the historical studies that make up the core of the book. I felt then that the concepts that I had used so far in my research were not going to be quite enough, and that I needed—of all people!—Ernst Kantorowicz on my side. My book owes immensely large debts to certain great thinkers on power, whose names will not surprise: Hegel, Weber, Du Bois, Arendt, Butler. But somehow the King’s Two Bodies kept coming through as I worked on the history. So, I adopted Dr. Kantorowicz…

Visit Isaac Ariail Reed's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Freeman's "Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice"

Andrea Freeman is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of Law. Freeman writes and researches at the intersection of critical race theory and issues of food policy, health, and consumer credit. She is the pioneer of the theory of "food oppression," which examines how partnerships between the government and corporations lead to racial and gender health disparities. Her work has been featured on NPR, Huffington Post, Salon, The Washington Post, The Conversation, Pacific Standard, and more.

Freeman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Skimmed shows how the stereotype of the Bad Black Mother, which began in slavery to justify the cruel separation of Black mothers and children, continued in cinema throughout the twentieth century. Portraits of Mammy first appeared in minstrel shows in the 1820s then jumped to the silver screen in 1915’s infamously racist The Birth of a Nation. Later, when Hattie McDaniel became the first Black actor to win an Oscar for playing Mammy in 1940’s Gone With The Wind, she needed special dispensation to collect the award from the segregated Ambassador Hotel. Other movie roles for Black women trade on the age-old tropes of the sharp-tongued, ball-busting Sapphire (think Foxy Brown) and the hyper sexual Jezebel. Halle Berry took flak from critics for performing an Oscar-winning role straight out of the Jezebel playbook, lustful Leticia, in 2001’s Monster’s Ball.

Page 99 gives a sneak peak into the Bad Black Mother stereotype’s depth and breadth. Expanding from popular culture into news and social media, she evolved into the modern Welfare Queen, a mythical figure who combines elements of Mammy (kind to white children but indifferent to her own), Jezebel (impossible to rape), and Sapphire (lacking a single maternal bone in her body). This lie supports restrictions on welfare and other social programs that make it harder for Black women to breastfeed. It makes doctors and nurses offer Black women formula instead of help. And it explains why the only images of Black women breastfeeding appear in formula ads and National Geographic. Ultimately, it contributes to Black women having the lowest breastfeeding rates and their children having the highest rates of related health problems, including infant mortality.

Missing from page 99 is the book’s central story of the Fultz sisters. Annie Mae Fultz was a Black and Cherokee woman who lost the ability to hear and speak in childhood. After the miracle birth of her four adorable, identical daughters, her White doctor Fred Klenner opened a bidding war among formula companies competing to become the girls’ corporate godfather. Pet Milk’s campaign featuring the girls opened the door to decades of successful race-targeted formula ads. Government support of the formula industry, including the United States’ refusal to sign on to an international agreement to limit formula marketing, harms Black women the most. The Bad Black Mother myth let Fred Klenner get away with tearing the Fultz family apart for his and Pet Milk’s gain. The stereotype masks the reality that using formula is not always a personal choice. Sometimes, it’s the result of structural factors that lead to ‘first food’ oppression.

Learn more about Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John M. Marzluff's "In Search of Meadowlarks"

John M. Marzluff is professor of environmental and forest sciences at the University of Washington and is the author or coauthor of several books, including In the Company of Crows and Ravens; Dog Days, Raven Nights; and Welcome to Subirdia.

Marzluff applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In Search of Meadowlarks: Birds, Farms, and Food in Harmony with the Land, and reported the following:

On page 99 of In Search of Meadowlarks I discuss how nesting success of birds varied among agricultural and reserved areas on a small organic farm in western Washington. These observations come from a study conducted by my colleagues and myself in which we found quite high nesting success by birds in both forest reserves and agricultural field borders. We found no nests within the active agricultural fields themselves. I went on to describe some of the birds we found nesting, which were mostly also those that inhabit nearby suburbs. However, the farm provided habitats for some different birds than did the suburbs, namely Rufous rather than Anna’s Hummingbirds, Tree rather than Violet-green Swallows, and a bird new to my study, the Common Yellowthroat. I used the remainder of page 99 to introduce the reader to the Yellowthroat, a migratory warbler, that becomes an important player throughout the remainder of the chapter.

One gets a poor idea of the whole book by reading page 99. While we learn a bit about how birds fare in agricultural settings on page 99, we learn nothing about what farmers can and are doing to make their farms more appealing to birds. We learn only about one farm on page 99 and nothing about the wide diversity of farms—each with particular issues and problems that are solved—I report from throughout the entire book. Nothing is learned about Costa Rica, Montana, Nebraska, or California on page 99. No knowledge is gained concerning the responses of birds and other wildlife to ranching, raising grain, or viticulture. Missing from page 99 are interesting discussions about how barn owls, bluebirds, and sparrows help farmers control pests on their crops. Also not mentioned on page 99 is a consideration of whether it is better for nature to reserve natural lands and intensively farm other lands or crop more land in a wildlife-friendly manner. The history of farming and its occurrence outside of human society is missing from page 99, yet provides an important introduction to the book. The evolutionary responses of organisms—weeds, viruses, domestic species, birds, and people to agriculture puts my book into broader context, but again this discussion is missing from page 99. Finally, the important discussion concerning how as a society we will meet the food needs of a growing and increasingly affluent human population while also conserving some of the natural habitats that other species require is completely absent from page 99. This discussion leads to the conclusion of the book wherein I emphasize the actions that we all—farmers, consumers, restaurateurs, and others—can do to assure future food security and a vibrant natural world.

I always enjoy assessing my books from page 99. I find it interesting that my reading of page 99 provides detailed and general information that might pique a reader’s interest in the rest of my story. As we learn about one type of bird, we might begin to wonder about other species and how they respond to agriculture. As we read about reproduction on one farm, perhaps we become curious about other aspects of a bird’s life, such as lifespan or migration. I discuss these aspects of bird life in other parts of the book. Lastly, I hope readers of page 99 will wonder what they can do to keep Common Yellowthroats common on farms. By continuing to read my book these questions are answered, quenching the thirst for more information that page 99 instills.

Learn more about In Search of Meadowlarks at the Yale University Press website.

See: Coffee with a Canine: Colleen and John Marzluff & Reese, Digit and Bellatrix.

The Page 99 Test: Dog Days, Raven Nights.

The Page 99 Test: In the Company of Crows and Ravens.

The Page 99 Test: Gifts of the Crow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Kadetsky's "The Memory Eaters"

Elizabeth Kadetsky is author of the memoir First There Is a Mountain, the short story collection The Poison that Purifies You, and the novella On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World. A professor of creative writing at Penn State and nonfiction editor at the New England Review, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Program, MacDowell Colony, and Vermont Studio Center.

Kadetsky applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Memory Eaters, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Bombing the Ghost

The girls from Harlem used to corn-row Freddi’s long, silky hair for him in class. Once he left a note for me in marker on the mailbox outside our building, his script white on the blue box: to liz♥freddi. Then he gave me an LP tagged and pieced up on the liner sleeve with cartoon images of himself and me gazing in amazement at the beauty and large size and bright colors of his lettering.

Freddi took me bombing with his crew one night, Darkside Artists (DSA), with Anthem and Shark, some other girls too—Psyche, I think, and a few who didn’t tag. We entered the tunnel at the north end of the Eighty-sixth and Broadway station and walked on a thin ledge, at platform level, a block or so to the southern edge of the ghost station: “91,” read the old mosaic letter work. The guys were dressed alike in long wool army coats and carried messenger bags heavy

Brilliant. This test located a page that does not offer a synopsis per se, but, by mimesis, captures the essence of my memoir. It landed on the opening for the essay “Bombing the Ghost,” which tells a nostalgia-tinged story from thirty years in the past. The essay’s purpose in the book, and purpose for me when I wrote it, was to offer an escape from the present-moment reality of my mother’s fast and spectacular decline toward Alzheimer’s and death. Later in the essay, the fourteen-year-old me comes home from an all-night graffiti outing with the Darkside crew to find her mother still dressed in the previous day’s elegant work outfit and engaged in an intense, wordless dialogue with the cat. Mother is clearly tripping on acid. The darkly humorous twin anecdotes of the essay—the mother tripping, and the daughter perilously walking inside a subway tunnel while a train passes—show the disconnect between memory and reality that is at the heart of the book. In fact, the events of this essay are disturbing, terrifying even. I remember feeling rootless and lost then, and how a pervasive, druggy atmosphere accentuated a kind of bottomless fear that followed me everywhere. And yet when I wrote the essay, my memory played tricks on me. It attached a sepia-toned veneer to that time. My mother’s beauty, the gritty shine of New York City in the early 1980s—these took over. I was in a mental state where I wanted time to stop moving forward. In writing this essay, I allowed it to move backwards into an almost imaginary past. At the same time, the “I” who narrates this essay knows that the actual events were not so pretty. My hope is that this essay evokes that nostalgic paradox—that tension between the positive cast of certain memories and their far grimmer reality.

Learn more about the book and author at Elizabeth Kadetsky's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Poison that Purifies You.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Cairney & Emily St Denny's "Why Isn’t Government Policy More Preventive?"

Paul Cairney is Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Stirling. His publications include Understanding Public Policy (2019), Making Policy in a Complex World (with Tanya Heikkila and Matthew Wood 2019), The Politics of Evidence-based Policymaking (2016), and The Handbook on Complexity and Public Policy (2015).

Emily St Denny is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Stirling. Her expertise lies in prevention policy, policymaking in the devolved UK, and public sector reform.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Why Isn't Government Policy More Preventive?, and reported the following:

Page 99 focuses on the UK Government’s public health policy and policymaking during a Labour government led by Tony Blair (1997-2007) and Gordon Brown (2007-2010). Labour’s election in 1997 had signalled a major shift in commitment to public health policies designed to reduce health inequalities. It saw smoking as the biggest cause of the health inequalities associated with ‘non-communicable diseases’ such as cancer and heart disease. It sought to boost the role of primary care in detecting illness more quickly, and to address the relationship between contributing factors such as obesity and ‘worklessness in deprived areas’. It sought to intervene early in the lives of children under three years old, to address likely inequalities in health, educational attainment, and ‘behavioural problems’. It also described new forms of policymaking, built on the idea of ‘evidence based policymaking’ and ‘joined up government’. The page ends by suggesting that key public health policymaking initiatives failed.

Page 99 is representative of one key time and place in the book. The Labour government era was sandwiched between (1) the Conservative governments of 1979-97, led by Margaret Thatcher and John Major, which had minimal interest in state action to reduce health inequalities, and (2) the Conservative-led governments from 2010, which inherited Labour’s commitment to reduce inequalities but also delivered an ‘austerity’ programme that exacerbated its cause (socio-economic inequalities). Labour’s election was clearly a turning point in policy, but its defeat in 2010 had a less clear effect. UK government policy from 2010 was marked by a focus on individual behaviour – smoking, drinking alcohol, eating high salt and sugar foods, and low exercise – rather than the ‘structural’ and environmental factors – income and wealth, housing, green space, pollution – associated with the ‘social determinants’ of health. Yet, Labour had also been moving in this direction, and its policies were closer to the government in 2010 than the one it replaced in 1997. The book also compares UK and Scottish government policy, showing that they faced similar problems in similar ways, with similar levels of success.

Page 99 ‘zooms in’ to the details of a recurrent problem in policy and policymaking. Governments in many countries seek to prevent the rise of (a) inequalities and (b) the costs of public services by intervening as early as possible in people’s lives. To do so, they describe an evidence-based and joined-up approach. However, governments do not keep up this commitment or solve the problems they describe.

Learn more about Why Isn't Government Policy More Preventive? at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edwin L. Battistella's "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels"

Edwin L. Battistella teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he has served as a dean and as interim provost. His books include Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others? and Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology. He writes a monthly column, "Between the Lines with Edwin Battistella," for the Oxford University Press blog.

Battistella applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, from Washington to Trump, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels picks up with William Howard Taft, who served from 1909-1913, and later was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Readers get a bit of his background, learning that the affable Taft was known as “Smiling Bill” and was Teddy Roosevelt’s chosen successor. But the two had a falling out as Taft reined in a good deal of Teddy’s progressive reforms. By 1912, Smiling Bill and Teddy were running against each other and the Bull Moose Party was born. Things got ugly.

Page 99 gives readers a good feel for the descriptions of presidents and the challenges they face, and Taft’s single term is a perfect illustration of this, sandwiched between Teddy and Woodrow Wilson and roughly midway between Washington and Trump. What readers won’t find on page 99 are the insults themselves, which occur nearby on pages 98 (for Teddy) and 100 (for Taft). On those pages, readers learn, among other things, that Taft called Teddy Roosevelt a “honeyfuggler”—an old term for a swindler or conman—and that that Teddy considered Taft to be “a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and common in him.” Page 99 is the set up, the necessary background to appreciate the insults.

Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels has an alternating structure with chapters covering key periods in US history and with sections on each of the nation’s forty-five presidents detailing how they were dissed. The introductions to the chapters provide context to the historical periods, from the Founders (Chapter Two) to the Culture Wars (Chapter Seven), and the book is adorned with caricatures by artist Morgan Pielli and with Etymological Explorations—sidebars that give the history of terms like copperhead and wimp, among others.

The message beyond the insults themselves is twofold: how consistent the categories of insults have been over time even as the words themselves change, and the power and importance of the First Amendment—the right of Americans to insult the president, whoever that is.

Visit Edwin L. Battistella's website.

--Marshal Zeringue