Sally Shuttleworth's "In Quest of a Cure"

Sally Shuttleworth CBE, FBA, is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, and the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. She has also taught at the universities of Princeton, Leeds, and Sheffield. She has published extensively on literature, science, and medicine: previous books include The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (2010, winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Prize), and the co-authored work Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019).

Shuttleworth applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort, and shared the following:

On page 99 we encounter Robert Louis Stevenson as a young man – an aspiring writer, but in ill- health. He was delighted when he was ordered by his doctor to spend the winter in Menton on the French Riviera, and explicitly without his over-anxious parents. On arrival, his elation turns to despair as his body refuses to obey his commands – he fears he may be dying. On moving hotels, however, his spirits lift when he meets a Russian child, ‘a little polyglot button of a three year old’ who initially pronounces him to be a mädchen (or girl) due to his long hair. He is soon spending all his time with her and her family, playing games, and at one point spending an entire afternoon ‘washing Nellie’s dolls with her’.

Stevenson’s ‘delight in children – their joy in life, their creativity and imaginative seriousness – which emerges in much of his later work stems from this period. Later that year he publishes ‘Notes on the Movements of Young Children’ which uses Nellie’s dancing to analyze why we find the somewhat graceless movements of young children so lovable. The attraction, he suggests, is in sympathy, as you ‘see her struggling to find expression for the beauty that was in her against the inefficacy of the dull, half-informed body’. Stevenson is fascinated by what he sees as ‘this war of intelligence against the unwilling body’. He aligns the position of the child, struggling to express herself, with that of the invalid, and also the artist. The page concludes: ‘The child is thus a figure for both the invalid and the artist, and in her sheer joy in life, and determination to overcome the limitations of her body, she clearly became for Stevenson a model for how to transcend the confinement of an invalid identity.’

I was delighted to find that page 99 is an excellent entry point for the book. In Quest of a Cure pursues the lives and writings of various invalids sent into medical exile in Europe by their doctors, roughly in the period 1860-1930, and this example illustrates how closely medical experience and literary writing were intertwined. The findings were often unexpected – in this case, Stevenson’s alignment of the young child, artist, and invalid. Much of the book looks at a period before sanatoria emerged, when invalids lived largely in hotels, and moved around freely; they also often brought their families with them. One theme that emerged during the writing of the book was the position of children in these resorts, accompanying their parents, or indeed suffering themselves. Such strange lives they lived: joyful, and cosmopolitan, as we saw on page 99, but also framed by the presence of disease and death.

Stevenson is one of the various invalids I look at who visited both Menton, and its subsequent, snowy, counterpart, Davos, in the Swiss Alps, where walks on the beaches and into the hills were replaced by vigorous skating and tobogganing, which Stevenson adored. When he arrived in Davos, he was accompanied by his new wife, Fanny, and stepson Lloyd. Lloyd later recalled that he had enjoyed his time in Davos ‘the tobogganing, the skating, the snow-balling’, yet it was a place where ‘half the population … were coughing away the remnants of life’. Stevenson himself became almost as famous for being an itinerant invalid as for his writings, as this 1955 advert for Guinness suggests:

The book follows Stevenson from Menton and Davos, to Bournemouth, and Saranac Lake in NY State, before his subsequent voyages to the South Seas and Samoa (accompanied by his family and redoubtable, widowed mother).

Stevenson is only one of many travellers for health in the book. Others include John Addington Symonds (who made full use of the sexual freedom afforded by his move to Davos), the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and in the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield and Thomas and Katia Mann. By focusing on two resorts, Menton and Davos, I am able to explore the intersections of lives in these self-declared ‘English Colonies’; the changing patterns of treatment, from balmy seaside to snowy Alps, and from hotels to sanatoria; and the highs and lows of medical exile, for patients, their carers, and their families.

Learn more about In Quest of a Cure at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Bryce's "Grounds for Exclusion"

Benjamin Bryce is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches courses on Latin American and global history.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Grounds for Exclusion: Race, Health, and Disability in Argentine Immigration Policy, 1876–1932, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds itself early in the section "Calculated Risk in a Racialized World." It examines the Punjabi labourers who arrived in Argentina in 1912, arguing that their journeys were the product of a mix of poor information and calculated risk regarding racism and economic prospects across the receiving societies. The page draws on memoirs (Totaram Sanadhya's account of a group of 46 Punjabis in Fiji trying to reach Argentina), interviews in the Buenos Aires Herald, and consular correspondence to show migrants paying their own fares, following kin, demanding protection from the imperial state, and acting on information that travelled by letter from a small group of Punjabi agricultural workers in northern Argentina.

The Page 99 Test works pretty well. Chapter 5, in which page 99 sits, is a microhistory of the 1912 Punjabi arrivals, set against the broader economic and diplomatic entanglement of Argentina and Britain on the eve of the First World War. The chapter argues that both worker agency and state efforts to halt mobility shaped this episode. A browser landing on page 99 catches the chapter’s broader focus on migrants as decision-makers weighing race, empire, and economic opportunity. What the reader would miss is the architecture around this microhistory: the book examines South Asians alongside Chinese, Japanese, Roma, Ottoman subjects, and eastern European Jews, and traces health and disability exclusions as well.

Grounds for Exclusion challenges the long-standing image of Argentina as a nation of open-door immigration. Between 1876 and 1932, Argentine officials built a long list of formal and informal grounds for refusing entry — based on race, health, and disability — that deterred many from ever boarding a ship. The inclusion of millions of Europeans was predicated on the exclusion of others.

Visit Benjamin Bryce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Quigley's "The Man Behind the Cane"

Paul Quigley is the James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Humanities and Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. He is author of the award-winning Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-65 (2011).

Quigley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War, with the following results:

The Man Behind the Cane tells the story of Preston Brooks, the South Carolina congressman who infamously caned Senator Charles Sumner in the US Senate chamber in 1856. Brooks’s bloody attack came in response to Sumner’s speech criticizing slavery and insulting one of Brooks’s relatives.

Page 99 comes partway through a section exploring the aftermath of the caning. It begins with a Senate speech delivered by South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, the relative whose honor Brooks was trying to defend when he assaulted Charles Sumner. Butler defended Brooks, as one would expect. Yet, interestingly, he did so with some equivocation, describing his younger kinsman as being “quick to resentment.”

The page then discusses various incidents showing that Brooks was “still spoiling for a fight” after the caning. For example, when he encountered Massachusetts Congressman Calvin Chaffee in a Washington hotel, he threatened to “whip him on suspicion of his having denounced his conduct … he wanted to whip a few more of the Mass. Men.” Around the same time, Brooks was writing letters to other northern politicians who had condemned the caning, strongly hinting that he would be willing to engage in duels with anyone who decried his bloody assault on Sumner.

The Page 99 Test does indeed reveal some of the major themes of the book. It features our protagonist, the man behind the cane, at his fieriest—demonstrating that the caning was no aberration in his life. Readers will also find on page 99 backward glances to the caning itself, which is of course the centerpiece of the whole book. On this page I note that as Andrew Butler delivered his speech, in the same room as the assault, listeners were undoubtedly thinking of the earlier attack. I speculate that “perhaps splashes of blood remained there, camouflaged by the crimson red carpet of the Senate chamber.”

In discussing Brooks’s willingness to engage in duels with his critics, the page also invokes something explored at length in the chapters on his early life: the fact that Brooks felt an obligation to follow the strictures of the slaveholding South’s culture of honor and manhood, even though his efforts to do so were often incomplete, or misguided, or in some way dissatisfying.

Finally, in touching on Brooks’s post-caning conflicts with northern politicians, page 99 gestures toward the broader political ramifications of the caning, which I emphasize in the latter part of the book. Not only did the caning nudge Americans one step closer to the Civil War, it also catalyzed a transformative public debate about free speech and political violence.

Of course, readers must read the whole book to properly understand Brooks’s motivations for the caning, which stemmed in large part from his frustrating experiences with violence as a young man, including his failed attempt to fight in the Mexican War. They must also read the rest of the book to appreciate the far-reaching impact of the caning on nationwide debates around slavery, free speech, and the rightful relationship between rhetorical and physical violence. But for just one page, page 99 actually does a pretty good job of introducing the main themes and characters of the book!

Learn more about The Man Behind the Cane at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mitch Ploskonka's "The Bad Poor"

Mitch Ploskonka is assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute (ATI). His research focuses on southern literature, disability studies, and popular culture.

Ploskonka applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Bad Poor: Race, Class, and the Rise of Grit Lit, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Bad Poor drops the reader into an analysis of a passage from Larry Brown’s Dirty Work at a moment when the machinery of the book is fully in motion. This is one of the book’s close reading chapters, where key Grit Lit texts become case studies for its larger claims. The ninety-ninth page centers on an extended quote in which a Black, disabled Vietnam veteran imagines a future beyond racial division, only to pull back and acknowledge the historical reality that “they keep us all separated.” My reading uses that turn to show the common impulse in Grit Lit texts—and scholarship on them—to conflate poor white and Black experience. This impulse inevitably falls apart under the weight of historical and structural reality.

The page also shows one of the book’s critical interventions by putting pressure on a tendency in scholarship to treat poverty as the overriding denominator that can explain other forms of difference. Class matters profoundly in these texts, but it does not cancel race. On page 99, that problem appears in miniature: what first looks like shared experience between white and black characters—military service, economic hardship and labor, bodily vulnerability—ultimately reveals the persistence of racial division rather than its erasure.

I’d say the Page 99 Test works quite well here. A browser landing on this page would not encounter every author or genre the book examines, but they would encounter both the literary texture of Grit Lit and one of the central claims of my argument: that Grit Lit writers construct a productive poor white identity through encounters with difference. Those encounters with race, class, masculinity, disability, and region are painful and often violent, but they become the materials through which these texts define themselves. Attempts to imagine solidarity across difference—and the equally frequent failure of those attempts—are not simply dead ends; they are part of the genre’s larger process of self-fashioning.

Learn more about The Bad Poor at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Parker's "Drama and the Death of God"

John Parker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Antichrist.

Parker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Drama and the Death of God: Secularity on Stage from Antiquity to Shakespeare, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains a description of Egypt as understood by the church fathers and medieval intellectuals, followed by a catalogue of the carpe diem motif in scripture and elsewhere.

This captures the overall thrust of the book quite well! The Exodus narrative long served the church as an allegory for overcoming bodily appetites through self-discipline. The basic idea is that you are enslaved to your passions. Barring divine intervention these can only lead you to indulge in secular pastimes — sex, food, drink, instrumental music, non-biblical scholarship (saeculares litterae), and other forms of idolatry. Indeed the pull of the vita saecularis or secular life is all the more powerful if you reject out of hand the possibility of an afterlife: "Our time is the passing of a shadow. Come therefore and let us enjoy the good things that are" (Wis. 2:5-6). "What is your life? It is a vapor appearing for a little while, and afterward it shall vanish away" (Jas. 4:14).

Scholarship on atheism, unbelief, and secularity has often insisted that nothing like our current understanding of these concepts appears before the modern age. In fact modernity has inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages a rich apprehension of what it means to deny God and to live in the world as it is with no concern for heaven. I tried to chart the development of this position by looking at the many atheists, unbelievers, and infidels who feature in medieval dramas dedicated to the Exodus narrative, the Nativity, and Easter. In my reading they are the progenitors of the skepticism that we see in King Lear.

Learn more about Drama and the Death of God at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael North's "Making Common Sense"

Michael North is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of English, UCLA. His books include What Is the Present? (2018).

North applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Making Common Sense: On the Construction of the Obvious from Antiquity to AI, with the following results:

The reader who opened Making Common Sense to page 99 would find three 18 th century thinkers duking it out over what is in fact the central issue of the whole book. The immediate occasion for this conflict is a book James Beattie published in 1778, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism, in which the sophists and skeptics in question are George Berkeley and David Hume. Beattie sees himself as the defender of common sense against the corrosive skepticism of his opponents, which he thinks of as both crazy and criminal. For Beattie, though, common sense is a set of self-evident principles, some of them quite general and abstract, such as, for example, “things equal to one and the same thing are equal to another.” These don’t seem much like what most people would consider common sense. Page 99 introduces the idea that Berkeley and Hume are in fact more commonsensical than their opponent. Both were, despite Beattie’s criticisms, fond of citing and relying in argument on common sense, but for them, common sense is simply rooted in the senses and does not extend to elaborate philosophical principles. Both intend to simplify the traditional account of perception, so that it does not rely on any sort of extension or abstraction beyond the purely sensory. As Berkeley puts it on this page, we don’t need any elaborate reasoning to believe in the existence of the cherry tree in the garden, because we can simply go out and see it. For Hume as well, there is no fundamental difference between a sense impression and an idea, and therefore sense impressions tell us as much as we need to know about the world at large. As the argument develops from this page, Berkeley and Hume come to seem more plain-spoken and practical, less prone to mystification, than their opponent, who sees them as little better than madmen. A reader could therefore find on this page a lot of what Making Common Sense tries to convey about the ambiguous position of common sense between the senses and sense and about the twisted and interesting history that it follows from ancient times to the present.

The Page 99 Test: Novelty: A History of the New.

The Page 99 Test: What Is the Present?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sean Keilen's "Shakespeare's Scholars"

Sean Keilen is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also directs Shakespeare Workshop, a research center that promotes Shakespeare scholarship, community engagement, and theatrical performance. He is author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature and the coeditor of Shakespeare: The Critical Complex and The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature. He is also head of dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a longstanding professional theater company.

Keilen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Shakespeare's Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Shakespeare's Scholars falls in the middle of an essay about The Tempest, with the title "Prospero's Lessons". There, I am reflecting on the ways that Virgil's Aeneid is an important source of inspiration for Prospero's various educational projects on the island, and also on the degree to which Prospero himself and other characters are aware of its influence. More specifically, I am in conversation with another scholar about these topics. The page captures the critical spirit of my book -- friendly conversation about the ambiguities and complexities of Shakespeare's art with other people -- but I don't believe it would lead readers into the heart of things. And what is that? Well, through essays about Love's Labor's Lost, Hamlet, and The Tempest, the main idea of my book is that being a scholar, for Shakespeare, means embracing a state of mind that is ripe for laughter, occasionally baleful, and ultimately deserving of compassion. And that is a lesson, I believe, that all scholars now -- including myself -- would do well to learn.

Learn more about Shakespeare's Scholars at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ainsley LeSure's "Locating Racism in the World"

Ainsley LeSure is the Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Brown University. She specializes in political theory, with a particular focus on the critical theory of race and racism, phenomenology, democratic theory, and feminist theory.

LeSure applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Locating Racism in the World, and reported the following:

On the 99th page, a reader will find important concepts—blackness, hallucination, myth, reality, the world, and vulnerability—that are central to the argument of Locating Racism in the World. Page 99 is twenty pages into chapter 3, “Blackness as a World Problem,” which is devoted to explaining what Frantz Fanon, a prominent 20th century Francophone psychoanalyst and political theorist, meant when he described blackness as an ontological problem in his seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks (1967).

Afropessimism, a relatively new school of thought in black studies, reads Fanon’s claims about ontology to mean that black people are objects—not subjects—who amount to nothingness in the antiblack world. I argue that this is a misreading. And it is important for me to show this because Afropessimism and its widening sphere of influence use this reading of Black Skin, White Masks to cast as naïve a core claim of my book, that democratic politics is our only hope to effectively challenge antiblack racism and to craft a commonly shared world that is hospitable to racial justice.

I argue, to the contrary, that Fanon actually means that blackness is nothing to the extent that it is like a hallucination in that blackness does not exist in a spatio-temporal environment, nor is it an actual phenomenon (object, person, or event). Nonetheless, like a hallucination, blackness establishes a parasitic relationship to this environment and the phenomena it holds. Ultimately, Fanon’s description of blackness as a hallucination demonstrates how racial practices project onto the living black body blackness—a mythological, European fabrication—and how this blackness gets materialized through human relations oriented around the myth.

By page 99, I am beginning to explain Fanon’s struggle to challenge blackness and how his vulnerability to hallucination whenever blackness is exerting its force on his perception of the world is his guide for discovering a solution. I argue throughout that Fanon’s thinking about blackness in Black Skin, White Masks models two democratic practices that are essential to making a world that protects against the harms of blackness: 1) awareness about the symbolic power that blackness, a form of racial common sense, makes available to us and 2) a committed refusal to partake in it in our everyday relations.

Visit Ainsley LeSure's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason G. Green's "Too Precious to Lose"

Jason G. Green is a Maryland-born community organizer, attorney, storyteller and entrepreneur. Green served as special assistant to the president, and associate White House Counsel to President Obama, advising on economic and domestic policy matters. Green co-founded SkillSmart, a company that reshapes how communities measure economic impact, and is CEO of EverGreen Labs, where he supports visionary organizations working to expand economic opportunity and strengthen community. Green serves as trustee to the Pleasant View Historic Association and supports its efforts to preserve the historic site. His award-winning documentary, Finding Fellowship, explores the rich history of Quince Orchard and the fight to preserve its legacy. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and Yale Law School, Green remains rooted in the work of truth and justice, investing in stories that remind us who we are. He currently spends time between Maryland and Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Ritu, and son, Aidan.

Green applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Too Precious to Lose: A Memoir of Family, Community, and Possibility, with the following results:

Page 99 of Too Precious to Lose captures a moment from my childhood when while I was walking home along our dirt road I was first called the N-word. I was walking down the very street my family had lived on—and ironically helped name Fellowship—when that word is hurled at me. The page ends with a question that lingers far beyond that moment: do I belong?

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Remarkably the last three words on page 99 are, “Do I belong?” Though page 99 is not representative of every scene or theme of Too Precious to Lose, it does distill the emotional and psychological core and motivation of the story. The book wrestles with belonging, identity, inheritance, and what it means to claim space in a world that can both affirm and reject you. That single moment on page 99 crystallizes those tensions. A reader opening to that page would encounter the wound, and also the question that drives the entire narrative forward.

Beyond page 99...

While page 99 captures a pivotal rupture, the book as a whole traces a longer arc, that moves through family legacy, place, memory, and resilience. The question “do I belong?” doesn’t stay confined to my childhood moment; it becomes a throughline that shapes how I move through the world.

Much of my work, especially in building community, is rooted in creating spaces grounded in dignity and respect, where people can feel a genuine sense of belonging. In that way, the question that closes page 99 is not only a moment of harm; it is also a catalyst. It pushed me to explore, be attracted to and ultimately help build the kinds of spaces I once needed but did not always have.

At the end of the day, one of the things that is too precious to lose is the hope—the quiet, persistent idea that we have the capacity and responsibility to build something lasting and better where people feel like they belong.

Visit Jason G. Green's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stuart Schrader's "Blue Power"

Stuart Schrader is an Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. His PhD is in American Studies, from NYU, in 2015.

Schrader applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test finds the introduction of a central tension in Blue Power, as I begin the seventh chapter, “A Colorblind Counterrevolution.” One key argument of the book is that police developed political power at municipal, state, and federal levels in reaction to the progressive and even revolutionary social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, including Black Power. Blue Power was a counterrevolution. This counterrevolution, however, would have to contend with the transformed social conditions of the era, including the racial integration of police departments. The Page 99 Test, therefore, does not offer a snapshot of the overall argument about the impact of police political power, but it shows how this political power was responding to the times.

This chapter introduces the upstart Bluecoats, a group of mostly young officers who took over the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association at the outset of the 1970s. It shows how the Bluecoats advocated a new approach to police hiring and promotion that discarded patronage, in favor of more fair, transparent, and widely applicable standards. This approach was meant to be “colorblind,” meaning that white, Black, and other applicants would all face an equal chance of success. The colorblind Bluecoat approach arrived at the same moment that federal and other laws required equal opportunity, but the two were not the same. Affirmative action clashed with colorblindness, particularly in the stationhouse.

Page 99 begins with the report of the Kerner Commission (or National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders):

The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson, found that rough and abusive encounters between white police and Black residents spurred the unrest of 1967 in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere. It thus endorsed recruiting and promoting African American officers in its groundbreaking 1968 report: “Negro officers should be so assigned as to ensure that the police department is fully and visibly integrated.” Putting more Black cops on patrol in still-segregated Black neighborhoods was supposed to ease tensions and ameliorate relationships between police and Black populations, preventing further civil disorder. Moreover, Black officers, better able to work undercover among their own kind, could also provide sharper intelligence than white ones.

Increasing numbers of Black cops were put in the impossible position of both maintaining a social status quo and alleviating the problems of police racism.

Yet many cities, as I detail on this page, had already hired Black officers, though not necessarily in numbers proportionate to those cities’ Black populations. This preceding integration exemplified the problem the Bluecoats wished to solve: some incumbent Black officers had obtained their jobs because of what the Bluecoats called “juice”—who they knew and what favors they were owed.

New recruits wanted merit-based hiring or at least clear standards, but those standards, if applied to some veteran officers who got their jobs through patronage, could, in effect, disqualify the older generation. Worse, the new standards, in many cases, became the basis for new exclusions. Fresh testing or educational standards often prevented, rather than hastened, the hiring of new so-called minority officers.

Clashes ensued: between older and younger generations, between rights-seeking marginalized groups and police unions, between police unions and the federal government’s civil-rights enforcement arms. A key takeaway from this chapter is that these battles over racial integration within police departments afforded police unions and other organizations critical experience with litigation, public appeals and media messaging, cultivating relationships with elected officials, and galvanizing broader constituencies.

Although resistance to integration failed, Blue Power strengthened in the process, honing its tactics. The fundamental problem of racist police practices inspired the Kerner Commission to push for accelerated integration. Unfortunately, those practices would persist, protected by Blue Power.

Visit Stuart Schrader's website.

The Page 99 Test: Badges without Borders.

--Marshal Zeringue