Julie R. Posselt's "Equity in Science"

Julie R. Posselt is an Associate Professor of higher education in the USC Rossier School of Education and was a 2015-2017 National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation postdoctoral research fellow.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Equity in Science: Representation, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change in Graduate Education, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Equity in Science falls in chapter 5, which is titled, “Inclusive Design and Disciplinary Boundary Work in Applied Physics.” It is part of an extended profile of a powerful young Black man, Joe, working as an administrative staff member in a physics PhD program; in spite of the program having mostly white professors, it had earned a strong, positive reputation for serving Black students.

This reputation wasn’t an accident. On this page and the ones around it, we see how Joe’s presence and leadership enabled both more Black students to enroll and white faculty to learn how to best serve them.

Joe, on this page, helps the program chair understand a Black student's behavior in a closed-door, “heart to heart” conversation. “You know as much as I know that you care about students,” Joe says. "But I don’t think you’re quite getting it.” The chair, to his credit, is not defensive and at the end of the day, responds with gratitude. Joe’s work here is the work of cultural translation, which I define as sustained effort to decode, value, and apply perspectives that are different than the ones into which the mainstream has been socialized.

For illustrating an example of cultural translation, which is a core theme of the book, Equity in Science passes the Page 99 Test.

It also turns out to be a surprisingly good window into the book’s intellectual approach. The book presents a comparative case study of academic organizations that have been working to become more inclusive. I use these methods to build theory about institutional change toward equity in science, and page 99 presents both the examples described above as well as the following excerpt:

It is worth pausing here to ask why cultural translation is necessary. Decades of research indicate that it is not uncommon for white faculty to hold different expectations from doctoral students of color about what constitutes good mentoring and student performance, especially surrounding notions of rigor and support. These expectations are just one of many areas in science and graduate education where symbolic and social boundaries meeting can generate misunderstanding and friction…. Until the academic community institutionalizes a shared belief that ‘good science’ involves awareness of the ways that subject matter and social dynamics are entangled, those at the core of the academic community need cultural translators: people who make plain the social dynamics hiding in plain sight.

It was my hope in centering Joe’s role within the program to center the power and necessity of the invisible labor that people of color engage in daily without recognition or compensation. Case after case, I saw in my research -- and we can see our own workplaces daily-- how Black lives matter to the wellbeing of organizations. If we want a world in which protests and social disruption are unnecessary, white folks need to keep learning and provide for one another the cultural translation that is usually led by those who also bear the costs of interpersonal and institutional racism.

Learn more about Equity in Science at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tahseen Shams's "Here, There, and Elsewhere"

Tahseen Shams is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Toronto - St. George, and the 2020-21 Bissell-Heyd Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the United States of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, and reported the following:

Here, There, and Elsewhere is about how, contrary to common perception, immigrants’ identities are shaped by geopolitics not just in the immigrant sending and receiving countries but also in those places beyond the homeland and hostland—places I conceptualize as “elsewhere.” Based on ethnographic data, in-depth interviews, and analysis of social media activities of South Asian Muslim Americans, it shows that different dimensions of these immigrants’ “Muslim” identity category tie them to different “elsewhere” contexts, such as those in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. But “elsewhere” does not mean everywhere. A place beyond the homeland and hostland by itself is not important to the immigrants’ identities. Just how a faraway foreign land becomes salient to the immigrants’ sense of self depends on an interplay of global hierarchies, homeland politics, and hostland dynamics.

Page 99 picks up this very thread to summarize how: 1) “elsewhere” contexts, by interacting with hostland dynamics, add global dimensions to immigrants’ homeland ties; and 2) how the homeland’s historic and ongoing sociopolitics make certain places more salient as “elsewheres” than others in the immigrants’ worldviews. The summary, which concludes Chapter 3, “Global Dimensions of Homeland Ties,” also reflects the dynamism of the elsewhere framework. It says:

“Homelands are not geopolitically static or isolated once their people leave for the United States. South Asia has long maintained relationships with the “elsewhere” Middle East, the effects of which have influenced various aspects of society in the immigrants’ homelands, including politics and religious life. These interconnections with “elsewhere” have come to affect immigrants by shaping not only their national and Muslim identities but also the ways they are perceived by the larger host society. In addition, the subcontinent’s past at the hands of British colonizers is still salient in the worldview of South Asians, including those who have immigrated to the West. The remnants of these countries’ colonized past are deeply rooted in their language, politics, religious life, and community-building. South Asian Muslim Americans are aware of the continuing conflicts between the West and the Muslim world. Their perceptions of these geopolitical conflicts shape how these immigrants navigate their Muslim-ness in the hostland, collectively locate themselves at the global level, and bring their worldview into their political engagements. These understandings of homeland-“elsewhere” dynamics are critical to getting a clear picture of the ways in which immigrants function as vectors of globalized ideas and perceptions…”

This paragraph also presents a crucial piece of the book’s central arguments—that immigrants are “vectors of globalization” who both produce and experience the interconnectedness of societies, not only the societies of origin and destination, but also, the societies beyond. Migration Studies, as a result of its focus on the dynamics exclusively between the sending and receiving countries, largely overlooks the impact of places beyond the homeland-hostland paradigm and consequently fails to see how “elsewhere” and the events transpiring them shape immigrants’ lives and identities. My book extends the scholarship by systematically showing how places beyond the homeland and hostland—“elsewhere”—shape how immigrants view themselves—i.e. self-identification with “elsewhere”; and how these places shape how others in the hostland view these immigrants—i.e., identification of immigrants by others in relation to “elsewhere.”

From this perspective, the page 99 test works for my book fairly well! But I encourage readers to read the rest of the pages too, as they show in other ways just how meaningful yet overlooked “elsewhere” is to the lives of both immigrants and of those around them.

Visit Tahseen Shams's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aaron Shaheen's "Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture"

Aaron Shaheen is the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he teaches courses in American modernism. His previous book, Androgynous Democracy: Modern American Literature and the Dual-Sexed Body Politic, was published in 2010. He has published articles in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, and a number of other journals.

Shaheen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens to the introductory section of a chapter that analyzes Laurence Stallings’s long-forgotten 1924 novel Plumes and, to a lesser extent, Stallings's screenplay for the commercially successful 1925 war film The Big Parade. I note that the novel is largely autobiographical, detailing the ways in which both author and main character chose a bone graft and heavy brace to save a wounded leg that would have been better off amputated and supplemented by a prosthesis. I then explain that the ensuing pages of the chapter analyze “not only the potency of the spirit that possesses men to fight wars, but also the spirit that the novel finds infecting them once they are wounded.”

Anticipating that many of my readers will have little, if any, familiarity with Plumes, the summary that constitutes the bulk of page 99 makes only fleeting gestures toward my book’s larger thrust, which is to track the ways in which Great War-era prostheses were designed to embody the spirit or personality of their wearers. This prosthetic vision could be found not only in novels and films, but also government rehabilitation publications, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor. Readers of page 99 would have to infer these larger dimensions of the book, but I certainly wouldn’t fault them if they couldn’t.

Still, I think page 99 can whet readers’ appetites, not only for my book, but for Stallings’s wonderful novel, as well as for The Big Parade, to which the novel is often compared. The prosthetic devices worn by veteran amputees of recent wars may not look much like those worn by amputees of the Great War; but this book attempts to show that our current-day desire to make artificial limbs transcend their cumbersome materiality stretches back over 100 years. Just as important, the book contends that even though organized religion took a big hit in the age of total war and mechanized weaponry, the human impulse to seek out forms of spiritual transcendence persisted, especially in the realm of medical technology and the various media that depicted it.

Learn more about Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lorri Glover's "Eliza Lucas Pinckney"

Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. She has written extensively about early America, including Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries.

Glover applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Eliza Lucas Pinckney describes the opulent house where Eliza lived in the 1740s, in the heart of Charleston, South Carolina. Hers was the largest, most elegant private residence in the city. When she left for England in 1753, successive royal governors rented the East Bay mansion, seeing it as a suitable home for the most powerful person in the colony. The page, while essential to illuminating Eliza’s lifestyle, does not capture the heart of the book—just as the lavish home did not capture Eliza’s heart. Part of page 99 reads: “Eliza’s education and personality made her quite adept at the role of refined lady. She acted her part. But sometimes she found it all a bit boring in comparison to botanical experiments.... Though she resided in the most majestic house in Charleston, Eliza’s mind, as a descendant explained, ‘does not seem to have dwelt on furniture or bric-a-brac’.”

The chapter that includes page 99 also covers an outlying decade of Eliza’s life: when she was filling more traditionally “female” roles as a wife and mother. Most of the rest of her adult life—the years before she married and the decades after she became a widow—Eliza was a quintessential planter-patriarch. We are unaccustomed to imagining colonial women as commercial planters, much less patriarchs. But Eliza met the responsibilities, exercised the racial power, and enjoyed the community authority that came with the role. She was, long before the Revolutionary War, proudly independent. “There is,” she said as a still-young widow in the 1750s, “no body to call me to account.” She bought that autonomy through brutal enslavement of people of African descent.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney recovers the life of an audacious agricultural innovator, a boundlessly curious Atlantic wayfarer, a ruthless enslaver, and savvy business entrepreneur who was also a woman. She kept a lifetime of writings, in which she was incredibly frank and reflective. Readers of the biography can, I hope, see in a new light the tumultuous unfolding of the Age of Revolution and better understand the far-reaching ambitions and wide-ranging roles of eighteenth-century women.

Learn more about the book and author at Lorri Glover's website.

The Page 99 Test: Founders as Fathers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek W. Black's "Schoolhouse Burning"

Derek W. Black is a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law and the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts in education law and policy. He offers expert witness testimony in school funding, voucher, and federal policy litigation and his research is routinely cited in the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also a regular commentator in popular media.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy discusses the challenges of establishing school systems in the South following the Civil War and emphasizes the freedmen’s role in overcoming those challenges. I write, “Having opened the schoolhouse door and all that it promised in terms of citizenship and democracy, Congress dared not close it. The freedmen, among others, would not tolerate it. . . . They, more than anyone, fully appreciated that transitioning to a permanent education system was crucial to their future place in the world.” The remainder of the page discusses how African Americans began to organize and demand the constitutional right to education.

This glimpse into the post-War period gives readers a good sense of the book’s overall themes. It reveals how Congress and the Freedmen saw education, citizenship, and democracy as tightly interconnected. It also reveals that America’s evolution toward a more perfect union has always involved struggle. A system of public schools came into being because African Americans fought for it.

A reader, however, might mistake the book as limited to the Civil War. The book, instead, covers the nation’s education and democratic history from founding to today, using our historical values to evaluate current policies.

But if readers were going to land in one historical period, the immediate aftermath of the war would be the one I would choose for them. Jim Crow segregation largely erased or whitewashed the freedmen’s pivotal role in constitutionalizing public education. So the basic telling of this story is important and eye-opening. I believe it will force a lot of readers to rethink what they “know.”

The freedmen’s pursuit of education is also emotional, so much so that it regularly caught me off guard. I found and was able to tell of slaves’ and freedmen’s very first encounters with education and what it meant to them. The stories often felt like something pulled from a Hollywood script rather than diaries and journals. The importance of education can seem overblown today, but the freedmen’s experience dispels that notion.

Finally, the post-war period is the most constitutionally significant in our history. It literally reframed our state and federal democracies and the right to education, serving as an anchor for the book’s thesis.

Visit Derek W. Black's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael J. Schreffler's "Cuzco"

Michael J. Schreffler is associate professor in the Department of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City, and reported the following:

I can't help but wonder if the designer of my book knew about the observation attributed to Ford Madox Ford, because the photograph and accompanying text on page 99 are surprisingly effective in encapsulating the themes of the book. The photo shows a trio of massive undulating stone walls rising on a hilltop above Cuzco, a city situated more than 11,000 feet (3353 m) above sea level in the Andes of Peru. Cuzco was the sacred center and capital of the Inca Empire, which by the early-sixteenth century extended from Quito (Ecuador), in the north, to Santiago (Chile) in the south. It housed palace compounds for the Inca rulers and their kin, festival halls and plazas, and a temple dedicated to a solar deity. The walls in the photograph form part of a complex known as Sacsahuaman, whose relationship to the city it overlooks remains the subject of debate. Francisco Pizarro and the Spaniards he led in the invasion and conquest of Inca Peru (1533-34) called it a fortress, a designation that has shaped understandings of the site to today.

The text beneath the photograph on page 99 considers why the Spanish identified Sacsahuaman and other works of Inca architecture they encountered as fortresses. Pizarro and many of his followers had spent their earlier years in Spain, where towns overshadowed by hilltop fortresses took shape throughout Castile in the wake of the "reconquista," the fall of the kingdoms of Islamic Iberia to the forces of Christian kings. The hilltop fortresses built for caliphs became the castles of feudal lords and royal governors, a transformation demonstrated most famously by the Alhambra, the Nasrid dynasty's sprawling citadel in Granada taken in 1492 by the armies of Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic Monarchs. For the Spanish, the Inca city and its hilltop fortress constituted a coherent urban form that was eminently suitable for adaptation as a colonial town. Other parts of the city, too, seemed familiar. At the foundation of Spanish Cuzco in 1534, Pizarro appropriated the Inca plaza as a plaza mayor, an adjacent festival hall as a church, and palaces and temples throughout the city as residences for the first Spanish settlers. Unlike the case of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, where widespread destruction preceded the establishment and construction of colonial Mexico City, the initial transformation of Inca Cuzco to Spanish Cuzco occurred through ritual, writing, and speech. The Spanish would soon come to realize, however, that the infrastructure of the Inca capital, which for many Andean men and women embodied aspects of Inca sacred history, was more resistant to adaptation than they had imagined.

Learn more about Cuzco at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benno Weiner's "The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier"

Benno Weiner is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and co-editor of Conflicting Memories.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Concerned that elites often expressed enthusiasm but harbored anxieties, the provincial directive added that propaganda needed to be carried out first among indigenous Tibetan leaders. Having secured their support ‘in action’ as well as ‘in words,’ ordinary herdsmen would also develop faith in the [Chinese Communist]Party. By paying close attention to propaganda work, assigning local leaders to appropriate positions with real responsibility, and consulting with them in good faith, provincial leaders insisted, “We can win over the majority and minimize resistance.”

When the Chinese Communist Party marched into the Sino-Tibetan borderlands of Amdo in late-Summer 1949, its leadership was painfully aware that it lacked a pre-existing presence in the region, could count on few friends, and had only a rudimentary understanding of the region’s demographic, economic, or sociopolitical makeup. Given these obstacles, obtaining the cooperation of indigenous Tibetan, Mongol and Muslim elites was considered absolutely vital. Page 99 is part of the introduction to a chapter focusing on these relationships. It is not the sexiest chapter. There are no armed confrontations between the state and local Tibetan communities, for example. Instead, there are seemingly endless meetings—to which Tibetan headmen rarely show up on time, if they show up at all. While a browser who opened the book directly to page 99 would be hard pressed to grasp its scope, the issues that are introduced are crucial for understanding the CCP’s early and ultimately failed efforts to “gradually,” voluntarily,” and “peacefully” integrate the Tibetan frontier into the new Communist state and nation.

The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier argues that the CCP’s goal in 1950s Amdo and other ethnocultural borderland regions was not just to construct a state, but to create a nation. While the former might have been accomplished through force, the latter required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Amdo’s inhabitants of their membership in a wider political community. For this reason, the CCP employed a strategy known as the United Front. In short, this referred to a transitional period during which class struggle would be deemphasized in favor of forming alliances with the region’s religious and secular leaderships. As outlined in the quote above, the idea was that through the charisma and authority these people possessed, the Party would be able to implement its progressive program while gaining direct access to the masses. Eventually, the fruits of these policies would convince the masses to request full political integration and the transformation to socialism. At that point, the period of the United Front would draw to its peaceful conclusion.

As I note on page 99, however, the CCP’s program was riddled with “ambivalences and tensions embedded in a system that combines centralized political power with meaningful popular participation.” First, it relied on indigenous elites to create the conditions for their eventual elimination as a privileged class. Second, although the United Front was meant to operate through “consultation” rather than compulsion, power relationships between the CCP and society ensured that both decision making and coercive capacities were always in the hands of Party elites. This came to head in 1958 when the United Front was abandoned in favor of immediate, forced collectivization. This led to large-scale rebellion, which was brutally put down with tens of thousands arrested and many thousands killed. Amdo and the rest of the Tibetan Plateau were integrated through overwhelming and often indiscriminate use of state violence, a violence that persists in the memories of Amdo Tibetans and others. Six decades later, history confirms that Party leaders had been correct about one thing: while ethnocultural violence can be an effective tool of state making, rarely is it a successful means of nation building.

Learn more about The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jack Meng-Tat Chia's "Monks in Motion"

Jack Meng-Tat Chia is Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on Buddhism in maritime Southeast Asia, Buddhist modernism, Chinese popular religion, and Southeast Asia-China interactions.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity across the South China Sea, and reported the following:

Monks in Motion tells the story of Chinese Buddhist migration in the twentieth century. It explores the connected history of Buddhist communities in China and maritime Southeast Asia through the lives and careers of three prominent monks: Chuk Mor (Zhumo, 1913–2002), Yen Pei (Yanpei, 1917–1996), and Ashin Jinarakkhita (Tizheng, 1923–2002). In this book, I coin the term “South China Sea Buddhism” to refer to the forms of Buddhism in maritime Southeast Asia—which use Mandarin Chinese, Southern Chinese dialects, and Southeast Asian languages in their liturgy and scriptures—that have emerged out of connections across the South China Sea.

Page 99 of Monks in Motion falls in Chapter 3, “Yen Pei: Humanistic Buddhism in the Chinese Diaspora.” This chapter of the book introduces readers into Yen Pei’s religious career, offering a window into larger and more complex dynamics of Chinese migration and transregional Buddhist circulations in the South China Sea, during the second half of the twentieth century. On page 99, Yen Pei had just migrated to Singapore and assumed the abbacy of Leng Foong Bodhi Institute in 1964. I explain why Yen Pei saw an urgent need to reform and restructure his temple:

… Mahāyāna Buddhism as practiced by the Chinese majority in Singapore was “mainly ritualistic.” This was because the religious activities in Chinese Buddhist monasteries and temples were limited to lighting joss sticks and the chanting of scriptures. Ong also notes that most Buddhists visited temples to seek blessings and recite the sutra, but they had little knowledge and understanding of the Buddhist doctrines. Furthermore, Buddhist temples and organizations organized few Dharma lectures and propagation events. Although many Chinese Buddhist monasteries had resident monks, many of them were ritual specialists rather than Dharma teachers. In addition, Ong notes that the lack of suitable religious spaces could also be attributed to the dearth of Dharma propagation activities.

In essence, page 99 pretty well sums up the developing situation of Buddhism in a newly independent Singapore and sets the stage for deeper discussion on Yen Pei’s career. The following pages of this chapter examine Yen Pei’s Singapore career in two phases: the first as the abbot of Leng Foong Bodhi Institute (which he later renamed as Leng Foong Prajna Auditorium) from 1964 to 1979, and subsequently, as a social activist and founding chairman of the Singapore Buddhist Welfare Services from 1980 to his death in 1996. Throughout his career in Singapore, Yen Pei promoted ideas of Humanistic Buddhism which began in China during the Republican period, brought over to Taiwan, and later transplanted to Singapore.

Going beyond page 99, the book demonstrates how Chinese migration contributed to the spread of Buddhism and establishment of new Buddhist institutions in maritime Southeast Asia. As I write on page 11: “Chinese migration and the spread of Buddhism cannot be understood in isolation, and each monk is treated as a case study to show different aspects of Buddhism in particular locations. These three cases do offer a range of diversity by which to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of South China Sea Buddhism.”

Yet, there remains much to learn about patterns of Buddhist circulations in the South China Sea and the ways in which modernist Buddhist ideas overlapped with, and perhaps, facilitated one another. I hope as readers learn about Yen Pei and the other monks in Monks in Motion, they will look and re-look at the connected histories of Buddhist communities in this region with fresh eyes—More stories of South China Sea Buddhism remain to be told.

Visit Jack Meng-Tat Chia's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Imraan Coovadia's "Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela"

Imraan Coovadia is a writer and the director of the writing programme at the University of Cape Town. He has written a number of novels, essays, and critical works on authors from Adam Smith and George Eliot to V.S. Naipaul and Vladimir Nabokov.

Coovadia applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela, and reported the following:

From page 99 (without footnotes):

Several insights in this passage attracted Gandhi’s attention. First was the out-of-date description of a ‘commercial company’ as the agent of empire, a commonplace about the subcontinent before the 1858 assertion of royal power over the East India Company after the previous year’s mutiny. Gandhi interpreted Tolstoy’s description to mean a mercantile policy imposed for the benefit of the centre. Then there was the disproportion in numbers which Tolstoy observed (‘a nation comprising two hundred millions’ versus ‘thirty thousand’). Next came the unexpected and pleasing comparison of national characters (‘weak and ordinary people’ versus ‘vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people’).

Taken together, these directed Tolstoy’s verdict that ‘the Indians have enslaved themselves’. It would be echoed in Hind Swaraj: ‘The English have not taken India; we have given it to them.’ The argument suggested that imperial power could be undermined by a withdrawal of cooperation, as recommended in The Kingdom of God, but experience showed the limitations of the proposal. The relative durability of the empire led to fruitful speculation on Gandhi’s part as to how the cooperation of the dominated was secured and what the process of decolonization would involve.

The literary device employed in the passage is the one long associated with the style of Tolstoy: defamiliarization. Defamiliarization, or estrangement, reveals an apparently ordinary state of affairs as extraordinary, producing wonder or horror at some circumstance which has been hidden in plain view. Custom, habit, tradition, and ideology conceal themselves by the fact of long familiarity, requiring the application of estrangement to be raised to consciousness.

Victor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist critic, placed Tolstoy at the centre of his investigations into the nature of literary discourse, while identifying defamiliarization or estrangement as the structuring element of imaginative texts. For Shklovsky, defamiliarization is the essence of literature: ‘Defamiliarization [ostranenie] of that which is or has become familiar or taken for granted, hence automatically perceived, is the basic function of all literary devices’ (emphasis added).

I think this page gives browsers a fair idea about the book's contents. The book has to do with the connections between Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela--how they related to each other, how they tried to understand the world around them, and how they connected our perceptions to the realities of politics. It also has to do with the connection between radical politics and reading.

But really this is a book about the single most important theme of this year: non-violence and the creation of a non-violent relationship between the people and the state. It is about three leaders, who were very familiar with the use of violence, who turned against it and spent their lives trying to reduce violence and antagonism (this is an interesting paradox not just in the case of Mandela, who actually set up an organisation for guerrilla warfare, but also for Gandhi, who served in the armed forces of the British empire, and Tolstoy, who was a lieutenant in the artillery). It's a book about Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela as readers as well as writers (of books, memoirs, stories, letters, and speeches). And writing it was one of the most surprising experiences of my life as I came to appreciate how deep the thinking and feeling of these three revolutionaries went.

Learn more about Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica Wright's "Snake"

Erica Wright's essay collection Snake was recently released as part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. Her latest crime novel Famous in Cedarville received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. She is the author of three previous novels including The Red Chameleon, which was one of O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of Summer 2014. Her poetry collections are Instructions for Killing the Jackal and All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned.

Wright applied the “Page 99 Test” to Snake and reported the following:

From page 99:

All of which is to say, nature has a better handle on its business than humans, but that doesn’t stop us from meddling. […] Like birds, reptiles can also redistribute seed and are a food source themselves. If that doesn’t turn your head, there are plenty of nonvenomous snakes that kill and eat the venomous ones. In North America, we have the indigos and the kingsnakes. In South America, there’s the bona fide assassin the mussurana that dines on vipers. (The mussurana is technically venomous, but harmless to humans.) Snakes’ potential for advancing life-saving drugs seems endless.

The short answer is yes, page 99 is a pretty good representation of the book as a whole. This excerpt falls in the last essay where I make a final plea for why the snake should be appreciated rather than feared. There are always unforeseen consequences when messing with ecosystems. Consider the python invasion of the Everglades. (Not for nothing, invasive plant species are doing just as much damage—if not more—and receiving a lot fewer headlines.) In this chapter I discuss the owner of a dog kennel in Florida who killed the snakes he found in his facility only for the place to be invaded by rats. It took years and thousands of dollars to fix the problem.

Also, researchers learn so much from snakes. Not only does venom have a wide variety of medicinal uses (and is being explored as a treatment option for diseases ranging from cancer to muscular dystrophy), but snake movement is currently being studied in hopes of improving search-and-rescue robotics. The Georgia Tech Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab studies sidewinders and western shovelnose snakes for their ability to navigate tricky terrains.

Page 99 also hints at a theme I explore throughout the book: humans are a lot more dangerous than snakes.

Visit Erica Wright's website.

My Book, The Movie: Famous in Cedarville.

--Marshal Zeringue