Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Elizabeth Pearson's "Extreme Britain"

Elizabeth Pearson, formerly a BBC radio journalist, is Lecturer in Criminology with the Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. She co-authored Countering Violent Extremism: Making Gender Matter.

Pearson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Extreme Britain: Gender, Masculinity and Radicalization, and reported the following:
Extreme Britain is about masculinities in extreme groups, and by chance, this page explains a key concept, ‘masculinity challenges’, and how they feature in pathways to the anti-Islam far right. The important point here is that violence and confrontation have meaning that is rooted in class and place. Violence enables men – and women too, but I get to that later - to claim the ideological ownership of physical space. Violence helps create extreme men and on this page, one far right activist, formerly in the British Army, explains a milestone moment of violence in his path to the far right.

The Page 99 test works really well in telling readers what Extreme Britain is about. The book explores radicalisation as a ‘masculinity project’: extremists aim to fulfil certain ideals of manhood in their radicalisation journeys. Violence, class, race and faith are really essential to the stories that ‘extremists’ in both the far right, and in a quasi-jihadist network, told me about how their lives turned out. And masculinity is a useful concept to understand how these actors understand themselves: what kind of manhood they aspire to, how women fit into hierarchies of gender and power in their groups, what kinds of sexual and moral behaviours make real men – and women.

Page 99 is in a chapter about the lives of the far-right actors before they joined the group. It shows how their gender values relate to their ideas about citizenship, and Britishness. It also shows how much their identities are rooted in their local spaces, friendships and antagonisms. In the next chapter, the book goes on to show how those gender values and masculinities are exploited in far-right groups, how they are continued there, and amplified. For instance, the idea that real men can handle themselves on the street, in a fight, to protect ‘their’ women and culture, and that elite liberals who cannot do that are inauthentic, and have no right to condescend to them on how they live.

What the page doesn’t reveal is the different masculinities and values in the jihadist network. Nor does it explain how women navigate these male-dominated groups, and the strategies they use to deal with the misogyny inherent in extreme networks, to take their place, and even to lead organisations, in the case of the far right.

The book is about Britain, but anyone who follows US politics, and is interested in populism, the far right and anti-Islam rhetoric will find a lot here that resonates. Masculine competition, misogyny, class and wider attitudes towards feminism and the state are key to understanding the popularity of Donald Trump, admired by all the far-right actors in my book. Page 99 encapsulates much of this and is a great place to start – (although I’d still recommend readers begin the book at page 1!)
Learn more about Extreme Britain at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 18, 2024

Kristin M. Girten's "Sensitive Witnesses"

Kristin M. Girten is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sensitive Witnesses: Feminist Materialism in the British Enlightenment, and reported the following:
On page 99 of my book Sensitive Witnesses, I present a fundamental distinction between two highly popular and influential periodicals of the eighteenth century: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator (1711-12) and Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744-46). The former is perhaps best known as a highly popular and influential accompaniment to eighteenth-century British coffee-house culture, which was instrumental in helping to establish the modern public sphere. The latter is often characterized as the first periodical written by a woman for women—and thus viewed as having set the stage for today’s glamour magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue. As its title attests, The Female Spectator broadcasts its association to Addison and Steele’s earlier publication. Throughout its copious pages, Haywood’s eponymous narrator regularly refers to “Mr. Spectator” as her “brother.” Moreover, Haywood adopts and adapts many of The Spectator’s key features. For instance, though they both center around an eponymous narrator, they are portrayed as having been conceived and composed by a committee. Furthermore, they both similarly appeal to a broad readership (including both men and women), inviting their readers to become correspondents and regularly including and responding to their readers’ letters in their papers. (It is uncertain whether the letters they incorporate are real or fictional.) However, on page 99, I present one key way in which Haywood’s Female Spectator deviates from its predecessor: namely, in its portrayal of sympathy. I argue that, whereas The Spectator models and promotes a version of sympathy that corresponds to what would be theorized by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) a few decades after the periodical’s publication, Haywood’s Female Spectator embodies a version of sympathy that instead accords with that portrayed by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Moreover, I demonstrate on page 99 that Smith’s theory of sympathy is founded on a notion of impartiality whereby the ability of one to feel sympathy for another is contingent on one’s success at cultivating a sense of indifference. Somewhat ironically, according to Smith, it is only when we can “moderate” our feelings through indifference that we are able to feel for another person (which Smith portrays as “form[ing] some idea of his sensations.” It is such a conception of sympathy that Addison and Steele’s Spectator exemplifies and from which Haywood’s Female Spectator departs.

Page 99 focuses on the antithesis of the sensitive witness—the “impartial observer,” which I characterize throughout the book as a “modest witness.” However, as the sensitive witnesses my book studies regularly perceive and style themselves in critical opposition to the modest witness, to recognize who the sensitive witness is not is to gain valuable insight into who she is. In fact, the feminist materialists my book explores perceived the practice of sensitive witnessing as both a challenge and alternative to the practice of modest witnessing. Moreover, it was precisely the modest witness’s claim to indifference they repudiated. Informed by materialism, they disputed the feasibility of such indifference, insisting instead that to be a creature in this atomically infused cosmos is to be radically open to one’s environment and, thus, to be constantly and irresistibly vulnerable (sensitive) to stimulation.

Page 99 sets up my discussion of how Eliza Haywood criticizes the indifference and related masculine modesty cultivated, asserted, and encouraged by The Spectator. Though Haywood’s parodic technique is unique, the criticism she poses is illustrative of the critical thread that distinguishes and runs throughout the various feminist works my book addresses. Not all of the authors I study are as overtly concerned with sympathy as Haywood is. However, all of the sensitive witnesses my book explores were similarly critical of the presumption of “impartiality” that Adam Smith as well as Addison and Steele encouraged and performed. Moreover, informed by a sense of material continuity, sensitive witnessing is distinguished by a belief in the kinship between self and other, which resonates with Haywood’s Humean understanding of sympathy. Whereas the modest witness evokes Smith’s “impartial spectator,” the sensitive witness challenges notions of impartiality and perceives relationships as based on connectedness (or, to quote Hume, “resemblance”) rather than separation.

Sensitive Witnesses shows how a group of female British authors of the Enlightenment transformed their perceived propensity, as women, to be distinctly sensitive or sympathetic to others from a philosophical impediment into a philosophical advantage. They employ principles of Epicurean materialism to show the infeasibility of the impartiality and masculine modesty that their male philosophical counterpart frequently claimed for themselves. With support from these principles, they encourage their readers—both male and female—to trade modesty for sensitivity, suggesting that doing so is not only appropriate given the nature of the cosmos but also beneficial to scientific discovery.
Learn more about Sensitive Witnesses at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 16, 2024

David L. Kirchman's "Microbes"

David L. Kirchman was the Maxwell P. and Mildred H. Harrington Professor of Marine Studies at the University of Delaware until he retired in 2020 and was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography. Author of over 175 papers and two books, and editor of the "bible" of microbial oceanography (Microbial Ecology of the Oceans), Kirchman worked on the marine carbon cycle in regions around the world, from the Arctic to Antarctica. He received a B.A. from Lawrence University and the Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Kirchman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Microbes: The Unseen Agents of Climate Change, and reported the following:
Page 99 is part of a chapter titled “Slow Carbon and Deep Time,” which begins by describing how the White Cliffs of Dover were formed by the deposition of chalk made by algae over millions of years—over “deep time,” a term coined by John McPhee to capture the immensity of geological eras, periods, epochs, and ages. Page 99 starts to lay out the evidence for the microbial origin of another geological feature: limestone-rich rocks in the Akademikerbreen Group located in Spitsbergen, an island off the northern coast of Norway. Based on chemical clues and microscopic fossils, paleontologists believe the limestone was formed by bacteria and other microbes that grew in layers, one piled on another which accrued over eons. So, the building blocks for the White Cliffs of Dover and the massive limestone bluffs in Spitsbergen are from the smallest organisms, unseen except under a microscope. These rocks appear in discussions of climate change because they store 100,000 times more carbon than is in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas. Microbes and carbon-rich rocks are a big part of the carbon cycle and of explanations for climate change that occurred in the geological past.

Superficially at least, page 99 isn’t like the rest of Microbes: The Unseen Agents of Climate Change. Much of the book is about the uptake and release of carbon dioxide by microbes as part of the “fast carbon cycle,” which runs much more quickly than the glacial pace of microbes in the “slow carbon cycle” described on page 99 and in the rest of the Slow Carbon chapter. Other chapters discuss the release and degradation by microbes of two other important greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide.

Yet, page 99 hints at the overall message of the book: microbes are huge sources and sinks of greenhouse gases, and what microbes do with these gases has to be considered in thinking about climate change. In the future, microbes could release even more carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, exacerbating the climate change problem now threatening the planet. But microbes may also be part of the solution. Microbes already directly or indirectly sequester a lot of carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere, and biofuels made by microbes help to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Other solutions relying on microbes could do more. In short, understanding the biggest environmental problem now facing society depends on the smallest organisms, the microbes.
Learn more about Microbes: The Unseen Agents of Climate Change at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, March 15, 2024

Donna J. Nicol's "Black Woman on Board"

Donna J. Nicol is the Associate Dean for Personnel and Curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University Long Beach (CSULB).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action, and reported the following:
On page 99, Dr. Claudia Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system’s first Black woman trustee, is chairing her first committee - the committee to appoint a president at the CSU Dominguez Hills campus in 1976. To help contextualize why Hampton asked to chair this committee, page 99 first refutes commonly held myth that the site for the CSU Dominguez Hills campus was chosen to appease Black activists and parents who complained to then-governor Pat Brown about the lack of educational opportunities for Black youth in South Los Angeles following the 1965 Watts Riots. Much of what is understood about California as a racial utopia is based in myth and the historical record shows that the site for the CSU Dominguez Hills campus was chosen for financial reasons, not racial considerations. By the mid-1970s, Dominguez Hills had a predominantly Black student body and Hampton wanted to ensure that the next president would be a strong advocate for continued Black student access. Concerned with the increasing political battles between Blacks and Asian Americans in the City of Carson where CSU Dominguez Hills was located, Hampton insisted that the next president had to be a white man who would remain neutral in local politics, while remaining a stalwart champion of African American educational interests. Page 99 begins telling the story of how Claudia Hampton lobbied for the appointment of Donald Gerth, former CSU Chico president, as the right white man for the job.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book because it gives readers some early insight into the political strategist that Claudia Hampton was throughout her tenure on the board. Page 99 falls in the middle of an explication of how Hampton used quiet observation of board culture and extensive preparation before board meetings to secure support for the policies, programs, and personnel she championed. Later in the same chapter, readers learn that Hampton went as far as cooking dinner for the white male board members and campus presidents at her home to gain access to the informal ‘telephone network’ where deals were made, and votes were counted behind closed doors. In cooking dinner for the white men of the board, I maintain that “Hampton strategically disarmed the threat posed by her race by playing to the gender norm of the day, using sly civility and respectability as resistance tools” (p. 102). I argue throughout the book that Hampton used Bhabha’s concept of “sly civility” as a resistance strategy against the deeply embedded culture of racism and sexism that was pervasive on the CSU Board of Trustees when she was appointed in 1974. By building personal relationships with fellow trustees and serving on multiple committees in her twenty years on the board, Hampton ensured that affirmative action programs were funded, helped increase the number of faculty and students of color in the system, and developed policies to hold campus officials accountable for the implementation of system-mandated affirmative action faculty hiring and student admissions programs.

The primary aim of Black Woman on Board is to fill the critical gap in the literature about race and gender in the appointment and exercise of university trustee power. Black women’s leadership at this level during this time was unprecedented. So, this story about Claudia Hampton and her strategies and actions in supporting affirmative action in the CSU system, and her relationships with key figures in the system and within state legislature is critical for our understanding how university boards can either thwart or support educational access for all, regardless of their race, gender, or income.
Visit Donna J. Nicol's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Matthieu Grandpierron's "Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War"

Matthieu Grandpierron is associate professor of international relations and political science at the Catholic University of Vendée.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline, and reported the following:
Page 99 gives an overall view of how well one of the rival hypothesis to the major argument of the book performs at explaining the British decision to reconquer the Falklands islands invaded in 1982 by Argentina. As such, page 99 explains that the idea of going to war for natural resources is a myth and can’t explain the war.

Therefore, the test of page 99 simply does not work at all for my book If a reader opens the book at page 99, he or she won’t just have a very succinct idea of a rival argument tested, but he or she won’t be reading about the main argument developed in the book and tested throughout several case studies.

What page 99 reveals is still interesting to read precisely because it disproves one of the arguments argued in the existing literature. To be more precise, economic considerations (getting access to natural resources) are mentioned in declassified governmental archives, but the argument is used to justify why the Falklands should be handed over to Argentina and not defended. Indirectly page 99 shows the relevance of the book: providing a new way of understanding decision-making processes and the need to use new explanatory and theoretical frameworks to better understand past events and more importantly events that are occurring today in a changing world. Giving new ways of understanding what happens in the world is what my book tries to do by offering a new framework called “nostalgic virility” and that articulates understanding of states status with leaders interpretation of history and of what being virile means.
Learn more about Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War at the McGill-Queens University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Arthur Goldwag's "The Politics of Fear"

Arthur Goldwag is the author of The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right (2012), Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (2009), Isms &; Ologies (2007), and The Beliefnet Guide to Kabbalah (2005). His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Salon, Truthout, the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog, and others.

Goldwag applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia, and reported the following:
So I opened The Politics of Fear to page 99, and about two paragraphs down, this is what I found:
Then came 2015 and the inexorable ascent of Donald Trump. Though Jeb Bush had been the favorite of the Republican establishment, Trump surged to the top of the polls and stayed there. I published an op-ed in The New York Times in which I called Trump ‘the latest in a long line of demagogues that have appeared throughout American history to point accusing fingers at Blacks, foreigners, Masons, Jews, socialists, central bankers and others.’ White nationalists were energized to see so unapologetically ‘pro-white’ a politician, I wrote, and ‘would-be Joe-the-Plumbers are inspired to see someone who talks and seemingly thinks just like they do and yet who has so much money.’ Trump’s poisonous message, I concluded, ‘may carry him to the White House.’
Page 99 certainly captures my feelings about Trump back then. But what a reader who read jus

t that one page would miss are the efforts I make throughout its nearly 300 other pages to put our current crisis in its historical, cultural, and economic contexts.

I’m not so much interested in Trump as I am in the phenomenon of Trumpism, whose seeds, I argue, were planted at America's founding. Eruptions of QAnon-level paranoia have happened time and again throughout our history, whenever the two main wires that feed into the American identity cross. One of them is Protestant religiosity. The other is the worldly individualism that we associate with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Each is bottom-up and anti-aristocratic, and both are compatible with capitalism. But they are not always compatible with each other; touch them together and they spark.

I write about America’s long-standing urban/rural divide, the ravages of technological displacement, the fear of racial displacement, and the psychic toll that the false promises of the Prosperity Gospel exact from our economy’s left-behinds. I explore what cognitive dissonance theory tells us about the stickiness of irrational beliefs, revisiting Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails, the classic ethnographic study of the members of a UFO cult whose behaviors when the world failed to end on the day their leader said it would eerily anticipated QAnon believers’ in the wake of Trump's electoral defeat.

I write about America’s oldest hatred, which is anti-Catholicism, and the rise of Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style antisemitism in the last century, which informs the many flavors of paranoid conspiracism today. I do some on-the-ground reporting at a Trump rally, whose crowds, it seemed, were less interested in Trump’s bombast than spending time with each other.

When I started writing The Politics of Fear in 2021, my great fear was that as Trump faded into obscurity, we would forget how perilously close to the brink our democracy had come. Now, I almost think of it as a letter to the future, a piece of evidence for its historians to parse as they sift through the ruins and try to figure out what happened.
Visit Arthur Goldwag's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Anne Berg's "Empire of Rags and Bones"

Anne Berg is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of On Screen and Off: Cinema and the Making of Nazi Hamburg.

Berg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test proved to be a poor fit for my book. Page 99 provides framing and background information rather than provide a sense of the role of waste and recycling played in the Third Reich.

Page 99 of Empire of Rags and Bones provides an overview of the infamous General Plan East, the plan for the occupation and colonization of the Soviet Union drawn up in anticipation of the Nazi invasion.

The experiences gathered in Nazi occupied Poland served as a guide. Given the vast expanse of Soviet territory the regime was determined to mine and gut the so-called subsidy zones and develop the so-called surplus zones to extract food stuffs and agricultural products for their own needs.

Of particular interest here is both the unequivocally genocidal intent of the plan and its anticipated differential treatment for agriculturally developed areas. Essentially, the General Plan East provided not only an “economic blueprint” but an environmental categorization of Soviet territory. The main goal was to “develop” the agriculturally fertile regions of the black earth territory in Ukraine. In order to satisfy the needs of the Reich and its occupying forces across Europe from grain reserves in Ukraine, the regime anticipated the deliberate starvation of millions of populations in the more industrialized northern regions, the so-called forest zone, around Moscow and St. Petersburg.

As becomes clear over the rest of the book, even the "colonial development" envisioned as part of the General Plan Ost, ultimately resorted to mining people and the land for secondary and inferior materials. Nazi Germany was a waste regime. It imagined Germans to be a people without space, strapped for essential resources, encircled by powerful enemies and threatened by degeneration from within. Accordingly, Nazi Germany developed an economic rationale that understood waste utilization as resource production. Neither “green” nor driven by environmental stewardship or care, the regime expressly linked waste avoidance and recycling with the politics of internal purging and imperial expansion. Labor extraction was key to the regime’s imperial agenda. The proliferating complex of ghettoes and camps that extended across Nazi-occupied Europe, became a crucial node in the regime’s waste management infrastructure. Under horrendous conditions, prisoners recycled the remnants of war and genocide, they processed waste and secondary materials on an industrial scale, they turned rags and textile wastes into uniforms for the Wehrmacht and German police formations, they disassembled military equipment, sorted metal junk, decommissioned munitions, recycled old shoes, and turned human hair into felt boots for the German army. In this fashion, the Nazi regime squeezed labor and material from subjected populations, attempting to close the raw material cycle and power the war machine to final victory. In the end, the regime suffocated in the glut of the very materials that were to guarantee its economic viability.
Learn more about Empire of Rags and Bones at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 11, 2024

Guido Bonsaver's "America in Italian Culture"

Guido Bonsaver is Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Pembroke College. He studied at the universities of Bologna and Verona, and completed his PhD while teaching at Reading University. Before arriving at Oxford in 2003, he taught at the universities of Sussex, Kent, and Royal Holloway London. In 2012 he was appointed Ufficiale dell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica by the Italian government in recognition of his contribution to Italian culture. He has collaborated with a variety of media outlets such as BBC radio and television channels, RAI radio and tv channels, and various specialist and generalist journals. His research work centres on Italy's post-Unification cultural history, with a particular interest in literature and cinema.

Bonsaver applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, America in Italian Culture: The Rise of a New Model of Modernity, 1861-1943, and reported the following:
Page 99 in this book discusses what image of the USA did migrants from Italy have before they embarked on their transatlantic trip. In most cases, they were semi-illiterate peasants hence their positive but vague image of America as a land of hope was very different from the patronising views produced in print by Italy’s elite classes. This single page does a good job in introducing the first half of the book, which deal with the image and influence of American culture during the years between Italy’s unification, in 1866, and World War One. Class differences were so marked in those times that I found it necessary to explore how different social milieus saw America in a different light. This page is also illustrative of the importance of the interaction between the arrival of American culture in Italy and the role played by millions of Italians who migrated there, most of them keeping close ties with their homeplace.

What remains out of that single page is the second half of the book which deals with the interwar years and the influence of Mussolini’s Fascist regime. During that period, migration to the USA was reduced to a trickle as a consequence of anti-immigration policies by the US government. At the same time, it is during the interwar years that the impact of American culture – from jazz music, to contemporary fiction, comics, Hollywood films and mass-production techniques – becomes dominant across all social classes and in all sectors of the culture industry. Indeed, I argue that this is the first example of the development in Italy of what we call “mass culture”. Another interesting aspect of the second half of the book is its exploration of the tension between the overwhelming presence of American culture and the nationalistic policies of the fascist regime which, particularly after 1938, attempted and failed to stem the flow.
Learn more about America in Italian Culture at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Matthew A. Sears's "Sparta and the Commemoration of War"

Matthew A. Sears is Professor of Classics at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of Athens, Thrace, and the Shaping of Athenian Leadership (2013) and of Understanding Greek Warfare (2019). He is also the co-author (with C. Jacob Butera) of Battles and Battlefields of Ancient Greece: A Guide to their History, Topography, and Archaeology (2019).

Sears applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sparta and the Commemoration of War, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Sparta and the Commemoration of War concludes the third chapter of the book, a section on how the Spartans commemorated the Persian Wars, especially the last stand of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The page states that the Spartans did not think of themselves as liberators, but instead focused on the excellence, glory, and fame of their war dead. Other states that did focus their commemorations on freedom-fighting, such as Athens and Corinth, tended to be more interventionist and fight more wars than the Spartans did after the Persian invasion. The Spartans eventually embraced liberation rhetoric too, which led them to fight more wars just as their Greek counterparts did.

The Page 99 Test, to be frank, works freakishly well for Sparta and the Commemoration of War. The paragraphs on this page encapsulate the main argument of the book, that, counterintuitively, when the Spartans emphasized what we would now consider “bad” reasons for fighting – glory, fame, and so on – they fought less often and less destructively than when they later claimed to fight for “good” reasons – such as for freedom or selflessly in the interests of all Greeks.

We sometimes talk about our own war dead in terms of glory and manly heroism, but we usually focus on self-sacrifice for higher ideals and altruistic campaigns on behalf of others. Yet, like the example of the Spartans reveals, commemorating war in terms of soldiers dying for freedom has done little to prevent war or mitigate its horrors. In fact, quite the opposite seems to be true, which the Spartans themselves found out.

How we remember war and commemorate the fallen reveals a lot about how we understand war in general, and has a bearing on how likely we are to fight wars in the future. We might not want to exalt glory and fame above all else as the Spartans did, but we should not mistake the commemorative rhetoric of freedom as being somehow anti-war. Ancient Sparta warns us that the language of liberation can disguise war-mongering, and, in the end, it does not often bring genuine liberation at all. Readers jumping to page 99 will find this core idea spelled out pretty clearly.
Learn more about Sparta and the Commemoration of War at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, March 7, 2024

James Gerber's "Border Economies"

James Gerber is a nonresident fellow at Rice University’s Center for the U.S. and Mexico in its Baker Institute for Public Policy and emeritus professor of economics at San Diego State University, where he also served as director of the Latin American Studies program. He is the author of A Great Deal of Ruin: Financial Crises Since 1929 and the textbook International Economics, now in its eighth edition.

Gerber applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Border Economies: Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide, and reported the following:
Page 99 throws the reader into the middle of the discussion in Mexico in the 1960s about the reasons for a special manufacturing zone that eventually became a concentrated region of manufacturing on the border known as the maquiladora industry. The debate in Mexico centered around the need to create jobs for workers at the border, many of whom had been migrant workers under the U.S. guest worker program, known as the bracero program, that was terminated by the United States on January 1, 1965. The core idea of the book is that Mexican and U.S. border communities are highly interactive, each responding to conditions that originate on the opposite side of the border. The discussion on page 99 is but one of the many cases where Mexican policy makers and leaders found it in their interest to consider how best to respond to changes that were happening on the U.S. side. Throughout the book, those kinds of considerations are matched by mirror-image cases where U.S. interests responded to changes in Mexico. So, while the discussion on page 99 does not expose the reader to the breadth or depth of the book, it does reflect a theme that runs through the entire work.
Learn more about Border Economies at the University of Arizona Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue