Duncan Pritchard's "Tempting Fate"

Duncan Pritchard is distinguished professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Epistemic Luck; Epistemological Disjunctivism; Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing; and Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction.

Pritchard applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life, and reported the following:

If you opened page 99 of Tempting Fate, then you would be jumping into the heart of my discussion of the nature of achievements. I’m arguing that achievements require more than merely the conjunction of skill and success. I illustrate this point by describing an archer skillfully firing at a target but the arrow being intercepted mid-flight by a friendly dog who catches it and places it in its intended destination. That the skillful archer’s arrow ends up in the target would not count as his achievement. This is because for an achievement one’s success must be primarily attributable to one’s own skill rather than to other factors, like something else intervening. The dog may have achieved something, but the archer did not.

This discussion gives you a sense of one of the issues we explore in the book, which is how luck of a certain kind can undermine achievements, but it wouldn’t be particularly representative of its main themes. The overarching goal of Tempting Fate is to convince the reader that we need a completely new theory of risk. This is not just because the existing ways of thinking about risk are wrong, but because having the right theory of risk is crucial to making sense of how taking risks can confer value and meaning in our lives. Think about Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan. The risk he took was monumental, but rather than diminishing his achievement it enhances it. We need the right theory of risk in order to explain how this is possible.

Thinking about Honnold’s climb helps to explain the connection between what’s on page 99 and the book as a whole. The risk-taking that leads to a flourishing life is aimed at significant achievements, which is why it’s so important to the book that we understand not only what achievements are but also how they relate to luck and risk. Honnold’s ascent of El Capitan is a great example of this. It’s a peerless achievement, but it also essentially involves a lot of risk and a fair amount of luck too. But as the book makes clear, the value of risky achievements isn’t just relevant to extreme endeavors like free-solo climbing. This is because all of us will at some point need to make fundamental life- decisions if we are to lead authentic, and thus flourishing, lives. Getting married, switching career, starting a family, moving to another part of the world—these are all decisions that are inherently risky. No matter how skillfully one makes them, there’s always the possibility of things going awry. That’s why we all must tempt fate, and thus embrace risk, at some point if we are to flourish.

Visit Duncan Pritchard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Casey's "The Sceptic Isle"

Steven Casey is Professor in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of eleven multi-awarding-winning books, including Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion and Nazi Germany, 1941-45 (2001); Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and the Press in the United States, 1950-1953 (2008); The War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War against Nazi Germany (2017); and The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War against Japan (2021). His articles appear in such outlets as Foreign Affairs, History Today, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Spectator.

Casey applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Sceptic Isle: How the British Government Sold the Second World War, with the following results:

In Britain, World War II is remembered as the “People’s War.” Crucial to this image is the notion of the so-called “Blitz spirit,” when people in all parts of the country kept calm and carried on, despite the relentless nature of the nightly German bombing raids. Yet this was only one aspect of what had happened. As the propagandists knew only too well, beneath this surface unity there remained plenty of unrest, much of it directed at them whenever they sought to massage the war news.

While The Sceptic Isle covers Britain’s entire World War II experience, page 99 specifically addresses a key element of the argument as it relates to the Blitz.

By November 1940, the British public had come to dislike and distrust the complex blend of censorship and public relations on the nightly air attacks. On the one hand, the government had prohibited the press from publishing not just casualty figures, but also the names of towns outside London and Liverpool, as well as specific locations that had been hit. On the other, it had sought to “play up” the destruction of “places to which special sentiment attaches” or that enjoyed “outstanding ‘news value,’” such as schools, churches, and hospitals.

The first two months of the Blitz had already seen a rise in corrosive gossip, including the belief that London “casualties are really ten times bigger than what we are told.” Then came the disastrous German raid on Coventry on November 14. Here, the survivors, dazed after the first attack and scared of a repeat, engaged in a particularly vigorous bout of speculation, resulting in “strongly exaggerated rumours about casualties and damage which quickly spread to the surrounding countryside.” Yet still the government tried to clamp down hard, placing a cordon of soldiers ten miles around the city to stop anyone, including reporters, from entering the stricken city.

Small wonder that the British public were often sceptical about what they were told. Page 99 offers a perfect illustration of government censorship and propaganda and its most brazen.

Learn more about The Sceptic Isle at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Europe.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Pacific.

--Marshal Zeringue

Verena Hanna Meyer's "Theologies of Remembering"

Verena Hanna Meyer is Assistant Professor of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia, and shared the following:

From page 99:

[Without denying the historical] factuality of Dahlan’s long dwelling on Sūrat al-Māʿūn, Pak Syukrianto cited other historical data to contextualize Dahlan’s agenda and to put his focus on Sūrat al-Māʿūn into perspective.

It is significant that neither of the two men criticizing the contemporary status of Fikih al-Maun questioned the significance of Dahlan’s historical actions for the organization’s current norms. Neither is the normativity of Dahlan’s example ever called into question. On the contrary, according to Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto, the problem was precisely that Muhammadiyah members did not know their history well enough. As Pak Munir criticized very explicitly, what other activists were doing was to project the present into the past. His critique articulates an insight familiar from social or collective memory studies as formulated by Maurice Halbwachs and his successors, that because memory is constituted by the frameworks and needs of present society, it has little to do with what actually happened. Pak Munir feared that Muhammadiyah members were doing a superficial exegesis of Dahlan’s life, simply accepting hearsay without inquiring into its reliability. Doing so leads to a collapse of the alterity of the past, leaving one with an unimaginative present and a subtly self-serving agenda. His insistence on proper historicity—utopian as this ideal may be—emphasizes that, for him, the organization’s focus on present and future does not erase the responsibility the living have to the past. This responsibility is to accept the past’s agency in subverting itself as it projects its mandate for change into the future, and to be mindful of the traces left behind as this past is erasing its own normative content. In this way, the crossed-out past can open possibilities for signification and the realization of true Islam.

Just like the authority of the Qur’an is not called into question among Islamic reformists (or really, most Muslims) on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, the same is true for Muhammadiyah’s understanding of the normative content of Dahlan’s life. At the same time, as is the case with the Qur’an, understandings of the message’s normative essence, separated from the historically contingent and applied to contemporary times, often widely diverge from one interpreter to the next. For some prominent voices in the organization, the historiographic and hermeneutic process needs to be improved, because a faulty understanding of Ahmad Dahlan’s life ultimately leads to decay and corruption. People like Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto seek to provide corrections through debates that take the form of seminars, publications, or, in Pak Syukrianto’s case, films. The point of these debates is not so much to reach an authoritative conclusion, but—as [detailed in the previous chapter—to keep the conversation open, to challenge and dispute dominant views, and to revise insights based on increases in knowledge and changing times.]

Someone cracking open page 99 and reading it top to bottom may not immediately grasp the primary argument of the book. Nonetheless, page 99 is surprisingly illuminating in specific ways.

The page begins with an ethnographic example, the voices of Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto, two long-time activists in Muhammadiyah, one of the two Indonesian Islamic mass organizations the book focuses on. While an ethnographic example is necessarily specific and only contributes a small piece to the broader puzzle the book discusses, it highlights a principal methodological commitment of the book: Centering local voices as experts on theological and historiographical questions.

But while small, the piece put in place by the two men’s theologizing is indispensable for the book’s broader argument. Both bemoan the fact that an uncritical and mythologized reading of the biography of Muhammadiyah’s founder Ahmad Dahlan has become widespread in their organization. Their concerns remind us of the problem that remembering the past, while compelling for its potential as a source of motivation and belonging, is also fraught within the forward-looking ideology adopted by Muhammadiyah, a self-consciously modernist organization. And this ambiguity about the relevance of the past in modernist Muhammadiyah is a central puzzle in the book.

Crucially, the book argues that this ambiguity is not an impasse or a symptom of the contradictions inherent in modernist movements. It is a theologically generative tension that we are more familiar with in traditionalist Islamic movements, where it often expresses the fundamental transcendence of and knowledge about God. Here, this tension organizes the theological meaning of the past: It gives rise to a kind of memory that allows the past to be normative, precisely because remembering itself, the process of retrieving the past, has to be accountable to the modern insights, including — in the case of Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto — the epistemic norms of modern historiography. This kind of accountability to progress was already mandated by Ahmad Dahlan, who bequeathed to his successors the responsibility to constantly renew the movement. This responsibility, as we read on page 99, “is to accept the past’s agency in subverting itself as it projects its mandate for change into the future, and to be mindful of the traces left behind as this past is erasing its own normative content. In this way, the crossed-out past can open possibilities for signification and the realization of true Islam.”

Learn more about Theologies of Remembering at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colin Farrelly's "Aging and the Ethics of Longevity Science"

Colin Farrelly is Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Studies (cross-appointed with Philosophy) at Queen's University in Ontario. He also runs the blog entitled “In Search of Enligthenment.“

Farrelly applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Aging and the Ethics of Longevity Science, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Aging and the Ethics of Longevity Science begins in mid-sentence, detailing how, in her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley portrays the potential perils of experimental science that transcends the boundaries between life and death. Shelley’s creature represents those perils, and he ends up killing everyone that Victor Frankenstein loves. The page then details how, like Shelley’s invocation of the creature, many philosophers invoke the potential harms of experimental gerontology by engaging in the creative use of their imagination. These harms are sometimes portrayed as perpetual boredom, or the harmful impact life extension would have on jobs or the damage to the environment. But, as page 99 later contends, what most philosophers ignore or marginalize are the potential benefits of translational gerontology, such as improving quality of life in late life. The page concludes by detailing how, given the “medialization” of the science profession- where celebrity scientists can reach large audiences of the public but often make claims that are not scientifically credible- the public can form a distorted understanding of the societal implications of the science of healthy aging.

Perhaps surprisingly, page 99 actually provides a succinct summation of the central argument in the book! Aging and the Ethics of Longevity Science is concerned, primarily, with the role of imagination both in experimental science and in bioethical debates and political imagination. The imagery of the creature in Frankenstein is mentioned with the opening words on page 99, which reads “…electricity, and body parts into science that transgressed the boundaries between life and death,…”. The cover of the book has the image of the shadow of the creature from Frankenstein off in the distance, standing on an iceberg (which represents aging). The image of the creature represents the imaginary harms the human mind can conjure up for research on the biology of aging. And the book’s central argumentation is that, while there are real potential harms that must be safely navigated to bring experimental gerontology from the bench to the clinic, a credible harm/benefit ethical analysis must consider the full range of potential benefits that would come from slowing the rate of biological aging. These include: (1) improving quality of life throughout the adult lifespan, but especially for people reaching older ages; (2) reaping significant economic benefits from healthy longevity, especially when accompanied by a reduction in (vs. expansion of) the healthspan– lifespan gap; (3) reducing some of the persistent health disparities that arise from variations in unequal environmental exposures; (4) increasing reproductive longevity and improved maternal health; (5) reducing the care burdens that typically fall (at least disproportionately) on daughters to care for their aging parents; and (6) Improving human, animal, and environmental health. While page 99 does not address the details of these six points, if does effectively frame a critical insight of the book – that the exercise of our imagination about the potential benefits and harms of experimental science can have a profound impact on how we approach the regulation of, and support for, this science.

Visit Colin Farrelly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nat Cutter's "Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712"

Nat Cutter is the Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange, with the following results:

Page 99 lands in the middle of a chapter about English-speaking communities in the Maghreb, which particularly emphasises the surprisingly significant role of women and children. This page, conversely, focuses on moments where relationships failed or women refused to migrate. We see the failure of newly minted British consul in Tripoli Benjamin Lodington’s marriage proposal to Urania Goodwyn, the fourteen-year-old daughter of his counterpart in Tunis—an unsurprising result for numerous reasons, from the fact they had never met to Lodington’s reputation for sexual misconduct. He concluded, likely smarting somewhat, ‘ye first repuls sufficient to forbid anÿ further thoughts on that enterprise … shall Content mÿ self in being less fortunate.’ We next follow how when Robert Cole’s similar appointment as consul in Algiers encouraged him to bring his wife over from Livorno after nearly two decades apart. Despite his numerous methods—writing to her directly (‘if you will afford me [your Company] after so long being alone, shall Lye under fresh obligations and studdy a welcome for you’); sending attestations from Deborah Baker, the wife of his predecessor; and inducing his brother, niece, and sister to advocate on his behalf—Mary continued in her absence. After five years of trying, Robert resentfully concluded in a letter to Baker, ‘do what you pleace with my W[ife] I shall never forget … her unkindness to me, by flattring me with the hopes of her Company 16 or 17 years’.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Page 99 is an excellent shortcut to how the book is written, and gives you a sense of (I hope!) how much fun it is to read, but offers only hints of what it claims.

On the one hand, page 99 captures powerfully the source base and deeply personal tone of the book. Everything here, and in the book as a whole, comes from little-known private letters, replete with secrets and surprises. Most accounts of British communities in the Maghreb are based on official diplomatic records, in which consuls paint themselves as impecunious, long-suffering, loyal servants of the British crown, engaged principally in pleading for the release of their countrymen enslaved by Maghrebi corsairs. In these accounts, English-speaking women are more or less entirely absent. Private letters are far more candid, presenting the Maghreb as a site of opportunity and enjoyment for men and women both. Page 99 hints at this when Robert Cole asks Deborah Baker, who among others forged a prosperous life there, to acquaint Mary Cole ‘with the Inconveniences of the place’ so that ‘if you can dispence with them I may hope to see you here’.

The book’s overall argument is that English-speaking expatriates in the Maghreb blended European and Ottoman practice, built networks with Muslims, Jews, and Christians across the Maghreb and Mediterranean, and learned to enjoy and manipulate both homeland and hostland. Whispered scandal, expatriate enthusiasm, relational networking, clandestine negotiations, and emotive language all recur throughout the book, but the failures on page 99 obscure much of this positivity. Moreover, it completely leaves out one half of the transcultural relationship on which this book focuses. There are Britons, merchants, and consuls, but no Maghrebi individual, Ottoman institution, or cultural exchange. Stopping at page 99 might make you think the book offers only a more vivid account of the miserable, marginal, and misbehaving consuls in conventional scholarship, rather than a dynamic, interconnected, locally embedded, and often hugely successful community with occasional failures (and a penchant for bending the truth in official reports).

Visit Nat Cutter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Goldring's "Purges"

Edward Goldring is Senior Lecturer in Political Science (Comparative Politics) at the University of Melbourne.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Despite the challenges of predicting purges, however, there are factors that are systematically associated with elite purges in dictatorships around the world. The previous chapter provided a series of general theoretical arguments that suggested that dictators purge elites for purposes related to consolidation, punishment, and scapegoating. Assuming that dictators wish to stay in power, chapter 3 proposed that dictators purge military elites to consolidate power, they punish disloyal military elites to reduce the likelihood of future challenges to the dictator, and they scapegoat civilian elites as a form of blame avoidance to alleviate threats to their position from the regime’s citizens.

Page 99 is broadly characteristic of Purges. It challenges the prior conventional wisdom, among some scholars, that purges are idiosyncratic and cannot be predicted, and it sets out the three main arguments that are proposed and tested in the book’s main empirical chapters. However, while the book takes a scientific approach to studying purges under autocracy, which this page typifies, in my view, it undersells the details on purges that I attempted to include throughout the book to bring the subject matter to life.

In Purges, at least the first two of the three main arguments may seem somewhat obvious (that dictators purge elites to consolidate power and to punish disloyalty). However, what amazed me when I first started working on the book was how scholars had assumptions about why dictators purge elites, which were specific to the country that they focused on. What was lacking was a book that set out the main reasons why dictators across the world purge elites and then tests whether dictators are successful at using purges for those purposes. This book attempts to fill that gap.

Visit Edward Goldring's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Sibley's "The Poetics of Incivility"

Emily Sibley is Senior Research Associate at Whitman College.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Poetics of Incivility: Satire and Subversion in Modern Arab Culture, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The authors, critics, and institutions that contribute to the definition of adab and thaqāfa [culture] increasingly formed their aesthetic opinions within the framework of the promotion of national culture. As Faisal Darraj observes, “What was the role of literature, as focused on by the schools, if not the discovery of an originary national spirit?” This national question looms over the creation of a literary canon…. Popular culture, even as it was reimagined according to the prerogatives of cultural decolonization and iltizām [commitment], holds this tension between the celebration of national culture and the condemnation of premodern forms as unsuitable for Arab modernity.

This is a relatively good test. My one reservation concerns where page 99 falls: in the weeds, as it were, of a surrounding cultural and literary debate instead of showcasing one of the forms of incivility discussed in the book.

Page 99 occurs in the middle of Chapter 3, which explores the values associated with literature in mid-twentieth century Egypt. The chapter analyzes a play by Yusuf Idris, al-Farāfīr, as a case study to examine theater, questions of cultural decolonization and authenticity, and political critique at the height of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s power. The central device I employ in relation to al-Farāfīr is qillat adab, which carries a threefold meaning: a lack of adab (adab as mannerliness or civility); nonliterariness (adab as literature); and physical comedy related to farce and slapstick, often incorporating vulgarity. In Arabic, adab refers not only to literature, but to manners and decorum. Adab is akin to civility, gained through formal and informal instruction and encoded in the literature studied in school curricula. Adab teaches people how to be good civil subjects, how to perform appropriate gender roles, and how to be a citizen. In the quote, Darraj points to this intersection of literature and education aimed at cultivating idealized values for citizens in the new nation-state.

I discuss the tension between literature aligned with this aim—“high” culture—and popular forms of entertainment, or “low” culture. In al-Farāfīr, Idris adapts a premodern theatrical form associated with village life. He seeks to craft a distinctly Egyptian theater, but doing so entails a rejection of the Western dramatic form. Is it thus unliterary? Contemporary comparisons between Idris’ aesthetics and the Theater of the Absurd offered a means of insisting upon literary merit, though Idris disclaimed any influence. His play is certainly unmannerly, with the slapstick title character challenging and mocking his ostensibly serious counterparts, the Master and the Author. Humor, farce, and the reimagined dramatic form become means by which Idris not only contests a modern canon heavily indebted to Western literary models, but also through which Idris issues a pointed critique of political and social restrictions on individual freedom.

Learn more about The Poetics of Incivility at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susanne Y.P. Choi's "Queer Resistance"

Susanne Yuk-Ping Choi is Professor of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also lead author of Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family, and Gender in China.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China, with the following results:

Page 99 of the book is part of the chapter entitled “New Chinese Queer Personhood,” which argues that sexual identity formation among LGBTQ people in post-socialist China does not follow the linear, universal trajectory posited by individualistic, Western-oriented theories. Using biographical interviews and narrative data, the chapter illustrates how sexual identity formation varies across birth cohorts, social classes, and gender, and is deeply connected to local history and cultural context as well as broader social changes.

Drawing on the experiences of a middle-class lesbian (Wen) from a small town in Central China and a gay man (Leon) from a well-connected cadre family, page 99 explores how internal and international migration for education and work contributed to the sexual identity formation of those born in the 1980s. Their experiences highlight the struggles faced by this cohort of LGBTQ people in China and how globalization, digitalization, migration, and exposure to the work of Western scholars such as Sigmund Freud and to queer cultures in Taiwan helped them overcome their initial rejection of their sexual desires and gradually accept their sexual orientation.

For example, on this page, Wen recounts how, while browsing the internet, she found her “type” in the image of a good-looking T (tomboy) from Taiwan, and how searching for this T led her to discover lesbian online communities in China. The page also documents how Leon became aware of his longing for male intimacy when he saw attractive male actors and male bodies on television and in magazines. He initially rejected these desires because of his traditional upbringing and his aspiration to lead a normative life that his conservative family would approve of. At university, he even dated girls on and off in an attempt to correct his desires for men. However, an academic exchange in Taiwan brought him into contact with pop-rock bands that wrote and performed songs about homosexuality, university courses in which homosexuality was discussed, and, for the first time, a gay pride parade. These experiences laid the foundation for an ongoing process of sexual identity negotiation.

The Page 99 Test is a fun test, but I am not sure it works particularly well for my book, which weaves together individual biographies and broader social changes while attending to variations in queer lives across birth cohorts, social classes, and gender. It is impossible to capture the complexity of the relationships between personal biography and broader social change on a single page.

In fact, the Page 99 Test might lead a browser to mistake the book for a collection of biographical interviews and overlook its broader aim: to explore changes in queer lives and the unevenness of these changes across social classes and gender, and to connect individual challenges and decisions with collective resistance by queer communities, government policies, transformations in heterosexual marriage and family, and China's growing social inequalities.

The book goes beyond documenting and analyzing changing queer lives in post-socialist China. It also provides a window into broader transformations of intimacy in China and other non-Western societies. The challenges and constraints LGBTQ people experience are directly connected to heteronormativity and to the institutions of heterosexuality. At the same time, changes in these very institutions, including the decline of marriage and parenthood globally and in East Asia, and transformations in family life, have also provided important resources and opened up greater possibilities for LGBTQ people to negotiate non-normative life trajectories.

Visit Susanne Choi's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yuval Katz's "Media Making as Peacemaking"

Yuval Katz is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Media Making as Peacemaking: Israel/Palestine, and shared the following:

Page 99 describes a scene from the Israeli television show Fauda, in which two Israeli commando soldiers talk about their decision to take an old Palestinian sheikh captive, as they try to use him as a bargaining chip to bring back their comrade who was taken hostage by Hamas. After witnessing the torture of the sheikh, one of the soldiers, Nurit, a woman who recently joined the unit, asks the veteran soldier, Avichai, a man and the unit's sniper, how they have become so cruel. He responds by explaining how the unit trains them to become mindless killing machines because if he were to hesitate to act on the battlefield, that would put him and all of his comrades at risk. Avichai concludes that if Nurit hesitates, she should never have joined the unit in the first place.

Page 99 fits into one of the key discussions in the book; it demonstrates how war alienates people from themselves in the name of ideology or patriotism, undermining possibilities to generate real peace with themselves and with their supposed enemies. The broader discussion about Fauda demonstrates how serving in this undercover unit ironically brings Mizrahi Jews, that is, Jewish people in Israel whose families originate from the Middle East and North Africa, closer to their lost Arab identity, because knowing the language and the culture is an asset in a unit whose main weapon is disguising themselves as Arabs to infiltrate Palestinian territories. However, because Arab identity is so cynically weaponised in this context, it ultimately generates alienation rather than proximity.

Visit Yuval Katz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sebastián Carassai's "Beyond the War"

Sebastián Carassai is a CONICET researcher, Professor of Foundations of Society and the State at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and member of the Centre for Intellectual History at the Universidad de Quilmes. He is the author of The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies and coeditor, with Kevin Coleman, of Coups d'État in Cold War Latin America, 1964–1982.

Carassai applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Beyond the War: Argentines and Islanders in an Unknown Falklands, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Beyond the War analyzes one of the most significant transformations within the British Empire during the sixties, often overshadowed by the excessive emphasis usually placed on the impact that the decolonization process had upon it. It concerns the strategic realignment that London—no longer capable of sustaining a unilateral design for its empire—carried out in consonance with Washington’s global designs. The Anglo-American bloc, it is argued on that page, redefined the United Kingdom’s global role, preserving relations of dependency and indirect tutelage in key regions such as the Middle East and Africa, and maintaining the colonial possession of several of the so-called “small territories” (today’s British Overseas Territories). This realignment officially assumed the name of an “special relationship,” a term that, while evoking a shared cultural heritage, concealed British subordination to American hegemony.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Certainly not. The reader who opens the book to this page will encounter an introduction that contextualizes the issue analyzed in the chapter of which that page forms a part, but nothing yet of its central theme: the economic, political, and human problems faced by the islanders of the Falklands during the dangerously uncertain decade of the sixties. At that time, all skies promised tempests: the long-deferred importance that London bestowed upon them, the entry into the United Nations of the sovereignty dispute with Argentina over the ground they tread, and the growing animadversion they awakened in an increasing number of Argentines. Page 99 is key as context, but it remains far from saying even a single word about the central theme of the chapter.

Today, the islanders of the Falklands/Malvinas enjoy a formidable economic present, unimaginable to any of the actors who star in the different chapters of this book. However, the unresolved character of the sovereignty over the land they inhabit makes the news every so often, as evidenced by the flag unfurled by the Argentine national soccer team in a stadium in Atlanta during the last World Cup, in 2026, which read: “Las Malvinas son Argentinas.” Beyond the War helps us understand how the “emotional community” to which gestures like those of the players appeal slowly matured in Argentina. At the same time, it lifts the veil on a lesser-known, today almost forgotten history of peaceful and everyday coexistence between islanders and Argentines during the long decade that preceded the 1982 war. It is a history about one of the most remote corners of the British Empire in the era of decolonization; it is a history of the diverse nationalisms in dispute in Argentina, which contributed to placing “las islas Malvinas” at the center of that nation’s identity sentiment; it is also a history about the resilience and tenacity of a small community of farmers, whose Britishness was called into question by many, even by London, but not by them, who, paradoxically, mostly never knew Britain.

Learn more about Beyond the War.

--Marhsal Zeringue