Eranda Jayawickreme's "Is There Always Value to Adversity?"

Eranda Jayawickreme is the Harold W. Tribble Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow at the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of moral and intellectual character, personality change in the wake of adversity, and flourishing. His awards include the 2023 Early Career Contributions Award from the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology, the 2018 Faculty Excellence in Research Award from Wake Forest, and the 2015 Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science. He is currently editor-in-chief of Personality and Social Psychological Review.

Jayawickreme applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Is There Always Value to Adversity?: Looking Beyond "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger", and reported the following:

Page 99 falls in Chapter 6, "Distilling the ‘Real Benefits’ of Adversity,” as I transition from a discussion of musician Nick Cave’s reflections on grief after his son Arthur’s death to a section examining whether adversity can reshape personality in measurable ways. The page opens:

Cave’s music and personal testimony together illustrate that confronting adversity and being spurred to change by it is messy, often incomplete, and not completely positive. As we will see, there is some evidence that other people can be similarly transformed by adversity to become more sensitive and compassionate toward the suffering of others.

It then transitions into a section titled “Post-Traumatic Growth as Personality Change,” which argues that changes people report after adversity should show up in stable patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior in order to count as measurable change.

I’d say that the Page 99 Test works pretty well for this book. The summary of the Cave discussion captures the main tension I work through across the eight chapters of the book: our investment in the possibility that adversity can change people for the better, set against the recognition that our evidence for this is not particularly strong, and the fact that the reality of facing up to adversity is more complicated than we’d like to think. In this context, the phrase “messy, often incomplete, and not completely positive” is a good summary of my argument. I grew up in Sri Lanka in the 80s and 90s during a civil war and insurrection, and I have long been skeptical of the familiar cultural refrain, especially prevalent in the United States, that suffering can and should produce positive change. My book traces the idea that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (a famous paraphrase of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker” from Twilight of the Idols) through philosophy, religious traditions, cultural narratives, and several decades of psychological research, and finds that much of the scientific evidence for post-traumatic growth lacks credibility, as it rests on measures that conflate how people talk about their experiences with how they actually change.

However, my book is not purely skeptical of the possibility of growth, and page 99 sits at the point where I shift from critique to asking what genuine growth from adversity might look like if we study it more carefully. One of my goals in discussing Cave's unsentimental reflections on grief alongside the more technical question of valid assessment is to wrestle with a hard question: how do we accurately capture the complexity of human thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the wake of hardship, adversity, and trauma? In other words, growth may be possible in the wake of adversity, but likely not the type of simplistic, triumphant change that Nietzsche’s maxim implies, and our assessments need to be sensitive to this fact.

Learn more about Is There Always Value to Adversity? at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yuri Pines's "China’s Aristocratic Age"

Yuri Pines is the Michael W. Lipson Chair in Chinese Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy, The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China, Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography, and other books.

Pines applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, China's Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period, with the following results:

Page 99 of my China’s Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period focuses on ebbs and flows of foreign policy of Chu—a dominant power in the southern part of the Zhou (Chinese) realm—during the final decades of the Springs-and-Autumns period (770–453 BCE). Having overthrown his brother, the ruthlessly expansionist King Ling (r. 540–529 BCE), the new ruler, King Ping (r. 528–516 BCE), opted for retrenchment and eased the pressure on Chu’s dependencies. This mildness backfired, however; several dependencies and allies interpreted it as a sign of weakness and opted to shift allegiance to Chu’s major southeastern rival, the state of Wu. In 506 BCE, Wu delivered a crushing defeat on Chu, even briefly occupying its capital. Once it recovered, Chu abandoned its erstwhile caution and began systematically annexing its former dependencies and allies, marking a new stage in its territorial expansion.

These policy fluctuations reflect a certain feature of Springs-and-Autumns politics: it was an era of constant political experimentation. Is it better to annex weaker neighbors or to maintain a smaller, more manageable polity? How should outlying territories be governed—by delegating power to indigenous elites, to autonomous appointees from the center, or implementing tighter centralized control? How can a rules-based interstate order be preserved amid routine infractions by major powers? How can effective governance be maintained in an age when many rulers ascend the throne as inexperienced youngsters—or even toddlers? How can domestic stability be preserved amid perennial competition among powerful ministerial lineages? What matters more the battlefield: securing victory or preserving one’s honor? Under what circumstances should the ruler consult the capital-dwellers? These questions—none of which had simple answers—continually preoccupied contemporary statesmen. Some offered solutions that were viable for years or even decades, but ultimately, no enduring remedies to these interstate and intrastate problems emerged.

China’s Aristocratic Age analyzes why—despite several temporary successes—the aristocrats of the Springs-and-Autumns period failed to design a viable polycentric political system. This failure doomed the aristocratic polycentric order. Statesmen of subsequent centuries sought stability instead in a unified, centralized, and bureaucratized empire. As I argue in the book’s conclusion, “After three centuries of the Springs-and-Autumns, China became immunized against polycentric rule. This may be the most surprising contribution of the aristocratic age to China’s eventual endorsement of the unified empire as the normative civilizational orientation.”

Visit Yuri Pines's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Everlasting Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elliott Logan's "Over and Over"

Elliott Logan is a lecturer in film and screen studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Breaking Bad and Dignity.

Logan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Over and Over: Performance, Time, and Resonance in Serial Television Drama, and shared the following:

On the one hand, page 99 of Over and Over is (I hope) not characteristic of what one would find and perhaps be most rewarded by across the book's length. Early in writing the book, I set myself a rule: no claims or lines of argument, no questions that propelled my inquiry forward, could be set out unless they emerged from a specific moment of television drama. So it's perhaps unusual that page 99 features nothing in the way of close reading to which so much of the book is devoted! Instead, fully two-thirds of the page is a rather abstract discursus on the affinity between the conditions of human friendship and the seriality of television drama. This is, happily, a core theme of the book's focus on television performance, and it is characteristic of the book that in this passage I am devoted to turning over the darker, less frequently considered face of this relationship between long-form television drama and long-term human relationships. Building on the work of the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, I note that while two good friends may each help the other to become who they are, "There is a dark side [...] to this promise of creation," one that also echoes the conditions of seriality. "[O]nce we feel there is nothing more in ourselves and in our friend to discover, 'once our interaction promises nothing new, freezes what has already happened ... our friendship is effectively over'. How do two people sustain their bonds and keep their promises if one or the other (or both) can no longer be seen as the person they were, or as able to be the person they wish to become?"

This is the core problem of interpersonal life that I identify at the heart of the moments I discuss in the book, one that serial drama is exquisitely poised to express and explore through its tensions between accrual and transience, the building of history between people and its gradual erosion or fading or deformation and development (for better or for worse) over time. If there is anything to which the book brings new attention, it is the positive valence of the provisional and transient as qualities that might limit the extent to which our lives and relationships become exhausted, trapped in sediment, "[frozen by] what has already happened".

Learn more about Over and Over at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunneva Gilmore's "Redressing Rape in War"

Sunneva Gilmore is a medical doctor specialising in sexual and reproductive healthcare in Northern Ireland. A member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists since 2018, she has forensic medicine experience and completed a PhD in law at Queen's University Belfast on reparations for conflict-related sexual violence. She has extensive expertise in reparations policy at national and international levels and serves as a Medical Member of the Victims' Payments Board for Northern Ireland. In 2020, she was appointed an expert on reparations at the International Criminal Court, focusing on rape, sexual slavery, and attacks on healthcare.

Gilmore applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Redressing Rape in War: A Medico-Legal Approach to Sexual Violence, and reported the following:

Page 99 immerses readers in one of the less recognised consequences of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV): the long-term harms that challenge conventional understandings of injury and, in turn, what meaningful redress should look like. At the heart of the book are the lived experiences of victims and survivors, alongside the perspectives of practitioners working in the field. Fittingly, this page draws on powerful firsthand accounts that may be uncomfortable to read, but are essential to understanding the cascading and interconnected consequences of CRSV.

As the book adopts a medico-legal approach, page 99 captures a central tension that runs throughout the text: the gap between existing legal conceptions of redress and the complex realities of lived harm. It highlights overlooked physical, psychosexual and stigmatising consequences of CRSV, the uneven development of care and treatment, and the ways in which gendered investment in health shapes available forms of redress. The discussion also considers reproductive implications, male victims and survivors of sexual violence, and the compounding effects of disability, illustrating how biological, psychological, social and legal factors intersect. Although the term itself does not appear on this page, it exemplifies the book's argument for a biopsychosocial-legal approach to understanding and responding to CRSV.

While page 99 offers a strong introduction to many of the book's central themes, it cannot fully represent its scope. A browser would gain a good sense of how victims and survivors navigate recovery for themselves and their families, and how sexual violence can profoundly disrupt identity, relationships, social roles and life goals. However, the book applies its medico-legal framework across the entire continuum of redress. It examines the evolution of reparations, critiques current approaches, and proposes a broader framework that brings together formal reparations, healthcare, self-repair and informal forms of redress. Ultimately, it argues that transformative redress requires an interdisciplinary understanding of both vulnerability and resilience, greater emphasis on rehabilitation and new ways of measuring what successful redress truly means.

Learn more about Redressing Rape in War at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret K. Nelson's "Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers"

Margaret K. Nelson is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology Emerita, Middlebury College. Her books include, among others, Sociology Meets Memoir (2024), Farm and Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the 20th Century, with Emily K. Abel (2023), Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (2022), and Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times (2012).

Nelson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers: Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont, with the following results:

The very top of page 99 ties up an account of why Abraham Cohen remained in Vergennes, Vermont when his wife moved to the nearby city of Burlington. The middle section, about Minne and Aaron Cohen is more complete:

Minnie Shuchman Cohen and seven children … arrived in New York City in 1913 and traveled directly to Burlington, where Aaron had bought them a house at 265 North Winooski Avenue (a five-minute walk from the house Abraham subsequently bought for his family). … Aaron settled his family in Burlington while he continued to live and work in Vergennes for four more years.

The bottom paragraph begins to tell the story of yet another couple, Rose and Alec Jacob Abramoff who remained married but lived separately.

Is page 99 representative of this book? Well, yes and no. On the “yes” side, the page offers detailed information including the names of both men and women, the years in which these people immigrated to the United States, the places they lived, the occupations of the men, and the domestic arrangements within their families. The level of thoroughness – drawn from newspapers, public records, and interviews with descendants – is characteristic of the book as a whole. But on the “no” side, the page gives no indication that the people were Jewish and that the place Aaron lived was a very small town. Indeed, this page focuses on the women who left their husbands (and the reasons for their leaving) while even as they continued to be married, rather than revealing anything about the generations of Jewish people who stayed and built their lives in the small towns of New England.

By the time the name of Abraham Cohen appears on page 99, the reader will know him well as a Jewish immigrant who was a junk dealer for over forty years. The reader will also know Abraham Cohen’s brother-in-law, Max Fishman, another Jewish immigrant who, by way of contrast, spent his life first as an itinerant peddler and then as the owner of a successful dry goods store that remained in business for almost 100 years. Both men lived, and worked in the same small town of Vergennes, Vermont. In subsequent chapters their relatives – including their wives, children, and grandchildren – will also come alive through my discussion of how Jewish people were integrated into places in which they constituted but a tiny minority. The conclusion compares the trajectories of Jews who settled in small-town Vermont at the dawn on the twentieth century with those who arrived three-quarters of a century later.

Learn more about Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.

The Page 99 Test: Like Family.

The Page 99 Test: Keeping Family Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew B. Kennedy's "Rebellious Follower"

Andrew B. Kennedy is Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from Tufts University, and B.S. in Psychology from Duke University. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a consultant, journalist, and teacher in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.

Kennedy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rebellious Follower: China's Search for Science, Technology, and Innovation, and shared the following:

Page 99 may be found in the middle of Chapter 5, “The Balancing Act.” The chapter explores how China’s reformist leaders started experimenting with a more balanced approach to science and technology in the 1980s, chipping away at state planning and allowing more room societal initiative. Page 99 notes how challenging and problematic these changes were. “While the creation of a foundation system created new opportunities for scientists,” it notes, “the liberalization of prices and salary disparities made careers in basic science unappealing.” While small startup firms emerged, “the private sector was still nascent and remained vulnerable to discrimination.” The program to create China’s own technology clusters along the lines of Silicon Valley “suffered from considerable ‘mission drift’ over time.” The passage concludes by putting these challenges in perspective: “expanding society-led S&T in a Leninist political system accustomed to central planning was bound to be fraught.” More encouragingly, it adds that it was “striking how much change China’s leaders introduced in a relatively short period of time.”

Overall, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Rebellious Follower. Readers opening the book to this page would quickly understand that the book is a deep dive into how China’s policies toward science, technology, and innovation have evolved over time. In fact, page 99 highlights a number of key changes at an important moment. Readers would also perceive that the book is concerned both with China’s changing approach and with the challenges and contradictions these changes have wrought.

One page can only say so much, of course, and readers would need to start with Chapter 1 to appreciate the full scope of the book and its argument. The story really starts in the 19th century, when imperialist incursions brought the concept of science to China in the first place. Debates over how to respond have animated Chinese policymaking ever since. In the 1950s, China embraced state-led science planning, inspired by the Soviet Union, but Chairman Mao Zedong soon tired of this approach. In the 1960s, therefore, Mao’s Cultural Revolution touted “mass science” as the path to salvation – a remarkable challenge to more traditional elitist conceptions of what science was. Following Mao’s death, a more elitist approach returned, but departures from state-led planning soon followed. In the 1990s, China began to embrace not only science and technology, but also innovation, and the country’s “innovation system” became a new focal point for policymaking. In the 21st century, China’s leaders have developed an “innovation system with Chinese characteristics,” one in which a resurgent party-state plays a critical guiding role.

Throughout this winding history, Chinese leaders have shown a deep and abiding interest in foreign ideas about how science, technology, and innovation work. Yet they have also repeatedly challenged these ideas, either resisting them or adapting them as they have sought to reconcile imported belief systems with local ideologies. Simply put, China’s leaders have followed foreign ideas closely, but they have been remarkably rebellious followers.

Learn more about Rebellious Follower at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Terra Ziporyn and Amy R. Wolfson's "Educating the Exhausted"

Terra Ziporyn is the Executive Director and cofounder of Start School Later and author of numerous books on health and medicine, including The Harvard Guide to Women’s Health. Amy R. Wolfson is a professor of psychology at Loyola University Maryland and a leading scholar of adolescent sleep health.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later Start, gives a compelling example of the challenges sleep researchers, like one of the authors, Amy R. Wolfson, ran into when they tried to convince school districts (translate adolescent sleep research into policy to benefit teens), in this case Worcester, MA (where the author was from at the time), and Seekonk, MA to set developmentally appropriate middle and high school start times. We note on page 99,

From the 1990s through 2019 they worked tirelessly to delay Worcester’s school start times. The school committee was still actively discussing potential plans as recently as 2021. Neighboring Shrewsbury at last voted to delay school start times for the 2023-24 school year…as have several other school districts…. Nonetheless, Worcester’s high schools still start at 7:20am.

As you will come to appreciate in our book, as captured on page 99, we learned early on that this was going to be an uphill battle – translating clear science on adolescent sleep and circadian health into meaningful school start times for youth. While the school district stories discussed in chapter 5, “Early Efforts to Delay School Start Times,” took place towards the 1990s and the early years of the 21st C, our book will draw you into understanding why research evidence on its own does not ensure that all school districts set school start times that allow for sufficient and regular sleep needed for optimal health and mental health. Our book both reviews the science of adolescent sleep health, historic disconnect between school start times and sleep research, early and ongoing efforts to set guardrails for age-appropriate school start times, perceived and actual hurdles, significance of the founding of the non-profit, Start School Later, and ultimately what it will take to sunset the start school later movement? Hence, Educating the Exhausted, not only captures the consequences of exhaustion for our teens and our society, but also how we have contributed to that exhaustion in decisions we’ve made about our schools and how we can address that exhaustion and its consequences by ensuring that strong science informs healthy public policy. Readers will come to understand exactly why our colleagues, friends, students, and communities have been tirelessly working to “educate the exhausted” for over three decades.

Visit Terra Ziporyn's website and Amy R. Wolfson's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tad Tuleja's "Skirmishes with Patriotism"

Tad Tuleja is a folklorist, songwriter, and former college writing instructor. The author of thirty books and numerous scholarly papers on American folk and popular traditions, he is also the editor of Different Drummers: Military Culture and Its Discontents and, with Eric A. Eliason, of Warrior Ways: Explorations in Modern Military Folklore.

Tuleja applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Skirmishes with Patriotism: Looking for America in the Long Shadow of Vietnam, with the following results:

Sixty years ago, at 24, I declined my government’s invitation to fight in Vietnam. I did so for what I believed were moral reasons, yet saying “the right No” to the war was a decision that had me asking myself for decades not only “Did I do the right thing?” but also “What if I had gone there?” Skirmishes with Patriotism began as an attempt to answer those questions. But the tale grew in the telling, and the book became a meditation that tries to work out more generally how manhood and nationalism come together around the noble infatuation we call patriotism. Ultimately it grapples with the question “What does it mean to say you love your country?”

The story begins in the Eisenhower 1950s, when I was a Boy Scout and the son of a U.S. naval officer. The book’s first half tracks my journey from that trusting childhood to the late 1960s when, having escaped the war, I spent some time in Paris and London. When I came home in 1971, I wrote an essay for Chicago Review entitled “Notes on a Homecoming.” On page 99 of Skirmishes, I reflect on that essay. It’s an appropriate glance at the book, for it shows an old man critiquing the certainties of his youth—the same critique that drives the book overall. Here’s the text of page 99:

On the facing page of my [Homecoming] essay, a French news photo shows an old Vietnamese woman aiming a rifle while a young woman corrects her technique. Are these the freedom-loving peasants we are there to protect, or a pair of VC irregulars with GIs in their sights? There is no way to tell from the picture, and that tells us something dreadful about the war: It erased the line between our friends and our enemies.

Yet this fact seems barely visible to the young radical-in-exile. He is talking of the war as a political evil, not as a place where people point rifles at each other. He is aware, fleetingly, that there are people involved. Not the Vietnamese: They are never mentioned in this diatribe on the war. But there are Americans there, in those “rows of dead soldiers.” In the first pages of the piece, as he sits in the sun playing Hemingway, he is aware of these men. “Comfortable in my cafes, wined, dined, and anodyned,” he imagines the faces of “young men like me who, unlike me, will not return.” It’s a small but telling moment of awareness. Even while riding the winds of smug outrage, he is able to recall, for a second, the break he’s been given.

I am speaking of this young man now as if he is alive, and as if, even stranger, he is not me. That is a way of creating a salutary distance, of owning and yet not owning these decades- old words. Yet it was some version of “I” who set them down. And they spoke some truth to the reality I saw then, to the power and the abuse of power that embroiled my world. I wish I could say I was more concerned with our soldiers than is suggested by the hint of “young men like me.” But that was a mission failed which has taken me most of my life to come back around to. It is part of why my “right No” is still a weight to be borne.

Saigon fell on the last day of April 1975. Within hours, American TV screens aired film of the victors’ tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital—soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City—and of civilians scrambling for space on the Air America helicopters that were spiriting people away from an anticipated bloodbath. The war that had torn us apart was over. We watched its final twitches in sick satisfaction.

In the second half of Skirmishes, I track my engagement with Vietnam and with patriotism from that grim April day to the present. In trying to understand what the war I hated felt like to the young Americans who fought it, I drew on the memoirs of fine writers like Philip Caputo, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, and Karl Marlantes. And I came to see that it was not impossible to reconcile a hatred of war with respect for soldiers. Respect especially for the sacrifices that they make “for God and country.”

The final chapters of Skirmishes move beyond the battlefield to the home front, where as I said in a song written decades after the war, “Elders write the contracts while children close the deal.” Writing this memoir eased the burden I’d carried for decades while convincing me that George Orwell had it right when he said the worst of war propaganda, “all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” Something to remember the next time somebody with a flag pin and no uniform tells you our latest “patriotic” adventure is worth service members’ lives.

Visit Tad Tuleja's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ankita Pandey's "Becoming Allies"

Ankita Pandey is Associate Professor, Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, India, and Research Associate at St Antony's College, the University of Oxford.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Becoming Allies opens onto one of the book's central concerns: the quiet, painstaking work of fact-finding by civil liberties activists. The practice is about independent investigations into police violence and abuse of power by state officials. But more broadly this practice is part of the larger ongoing contestation over who gets to tell the story of injustice? This page is in a chapter that explores activist fact-finding as a political act.

The page notes that the work of civil liberties teams was to uncover facts, and to unsettle official truths. Their reports showed how ordinary legal procedures could become instruments of injustice. Words such as "and others", in a police complaint could leave several unnamed people vulnerable to future arrest. Fact finding revealed that official records failed to match eyewitness accounts. Procedures were ignored, rewritten, or invented after the event. The fact-finding reports by civil liberties activists asked: why were people arrested who had never been at the scene? Why was live ammunition used before less violent measures were exhausted? The struggle, the page suggests, was over who possessed the authority to say what had happened.

Would a reader who stumbled upon page 99 grasp the essence of the book?

In many ways, yes. They would encounter one of its recurring themes: democracy depends on those who patiently investigate, document, and amplify the voices of others. Fact-finding is one of the principal ways the allies in this book practised politics. Yet page 99 might make a casual reader assume the book is about human rights investigations alone. It is not. It is about the practices of people who undertake such work, and the distinctive political role they play. Becoming Allies asks: why do some people raise awareness around injustices that they do not have a direct stake in? It follows the practices of lawyers, judges, journalists, academics and other concerned citizens who defended political prisoners, documented communal violence, supported labourers, and stood beside marginalised communities.

Seeing these people as allies shifts our attention from a bi-polar conflict between movements and the state to the relationships that connect them. The book develops the ideas of ally activism and the politics of amplification to show how local struggles become public causes, and how voices travel beyond the places where they first emerged.

If page 99 offers a glimpse of one practice, the book asks readers to notice the invisible labour of those who gather the testimonies, preserve the evidence, carry stories across institutions and refuse to let injustice disappear into silence.

Learn more about Becoming Allies at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Ganson's "Lady Daredevils"

Barbara Ganson is a professor of history at Florida Atlantic University. She is a guest curator at the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum and a private pilot. Her books include Texas Takes Wing: A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State.

Ganson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lady Daredevils: American Women and Early Aviation, and reported the following:

On the half page numbered 99, there is an illustration of altitude record setter Ruth Blaney Alexander in San Diego, in 1929. She is smiling while sitting in the cockpit of her airplane with a stuffed animal dog mascot and a bouquet of beautiful flowers. Below the image, I quote her endearing letter she wrote to her third husband, which sheds light on her emotional state before her departure to return home to Kansas. She left behind her wedding ring and might have been considering leaving him. Another letter she left for her parents to be opened only in case of death, asking them "not to wish her back," because she has gone on to a happier life and will wait for them there. She then mentions that the "way of life is hilly" and right then she was at the bottom of one of the hills and the next one looked tough to her. Ruth Blaney Alexander mentions "she had the promise of a ship, gas, and an engine but no money to back her flights," but somehow, “she would manage.”

The letters she left behind for her loved ones allow the reader to understand how aviators dealt with the realty of flying at a time when things could and often went terribly wrong during the early years of flight.

Overall, page 99 well represents the book which aims to describe and analyze the experiences of lesser-known (and well known) women aviators. It illustrates well the depth of my research, as these are rare letters.

Learn more about Lady Daredevils at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue