Emily Sibley's "The Poetics of Incivility"

Emily Sibley is Senior Research Associate at Whitman College.

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Susanne Choi's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yuval Katz's "Media Making as Peacemaking"

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

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

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

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

Visit Yuval Katz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sebastián Carassai's "Beyond the War"

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

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

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

Does the Page 99 Test work?

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

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

Learn more about Beyond the War.

--Marhsal Zeringue

Benjamin Lewis Robinson's "Need/Emergency"

Benjamin Lewis Robinson is Assistant Professor of German at NYU.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Need/Emergency: Political Theater in Exigent Times, with the following results:

Serendipitously, page 99 opens on a discussion of the famous – or infamous – chapter “The Social Question” in Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), which is central to the argument of my book. Arendt claims that the liberatory promise of French Revolution was undone when “the poor, driven by the need of their bodies burst on to the scene.” For Arendt, need and politics are incompatible. When need in the form of mass poverty appears on the political scene, “freedom is sacrificed to necessity.”

I take up Arendt’s claim, not on theoretical or political grounds, but rather theatrical ones: I am interested in her dramatic conception of politics, the staging of “the scene,” and the ways in which, in her own account, “need” unsettles it. Arendt acknowledges the force of need—it “drives” bodies that then “burst” into view. But at the same time – in a gesture that has perplexed many of her readers – Arendt dismisses the political relevance of need. This is because she identifies its social manifestation with the intimate bodily experience. Arendt writes: “The most powerful necessity of which we are aware in self-introspection, is the life process which permeates our bodies and keeps them in a constant state of a change whose movements are automatic, independent of our own activities, and irresistible—i.e., of an overwhelming urgency.” Poverty, she argues, is the experience of subjection to this urgent “life process,” which she describes as “the absolute dictate” of the body. For Arendt, when the compulsions of bodily need enter the political scene, politics succumbs to the same necessity.

I see this differently. Need/Emergency shows how the appearance of need in modernity transforms the political theater. This is, as I argue in the remainder of the chapter, what Georg Büchner does in Danton’s Death (1835) and Woyzeck (1837). Rather than modelling politics on the drama of speaking actors, Büchner’s “theater of exigency” presents figures in need – from sex workers to single mothers to exploited soldiers – who do not count as recognized political actors and so turn to other and ambiguous modes of corporeal expression to agitate politically.

Does page 99 give a good impression of the book as a whole?

The Page 99 Test provides a surprisingly good entry into my book. It introduces my disagreement with Hannah Arendt which is political theatrical in the first instance. In The Human Condition, Arendt says that theater is “the political art par excellence.” But she means a very particular kind of theater: drama, understood as the imitation of action among actors. Need/Emergency asks: What would be the consequence for Arendt’s political thought had she actually gone to the theater? And so I go to the theater with Arendt and other political thinkers to see how works of theater, from the French Revolution to the present day, disrupt the assumptions that inform their theoretical views on the political scene. This is what I mean by “political theater.” Our political imaginary, theory, and institutions rely on the metaphors, devices, conceits, and machinery of the theater. Works of theater that challenge these conventions in response to social upheavals are illuminating therefore for understanding politics.

Page 99 also happens to reference a key term in my book, the German word Not, which comes up in Arendt’s own translation of On Revolution. The German word she uses to translate “needs” is Not. But Not means not only dire need, but also emergency. I took this ambiguity for the title of the book. I argue – and one only need think back to the Covid-19 pandemic or indeed to the wildfires and heatwaves of this summer – that modern politics is preoccupied with the critical temporality of emergency, which obscures chronic social, infrastructural, and ecological dimensions of need. Our current politics of emergency measures will continue to be stopgap, presentist, parochial, and anthropocentric until this ambiguity is acknowledged.

This requires a fundamental change in the prevailing conception of politics. For this, I argue, one can look to the theater, which has long experimented with bringing about such change. Along with Büchner’s theater of exigency, I consider Heinrich von Kleist’s theater of sovereignty and the plague, Bertolt Brecht’s theater of unrestrained consumption in the Great Acceleration, Friedrich Hölderlin’s tragedy of the Anthropocene, and Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek’s infrastructural theater. Each addresses an exigent and habitually overlooked dimension of our current political theater – and in so doing brings into focus the need for politics in the first place.

Learn more about Need/Emergency at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nozomi Naoi's "The Land of Happiness"

Nozomi Naoi is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her first book Yumeji Modern received Honorable Mention for the John Whitney Hall Prize. She also co-curated the exhibition “Made in Japan: Twentieth-Century Poster Art” at the Poster House Museum in New York in 2023.

Naoi applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life is actually the first page of Chapter 2 (Envisioning the Modern Family: Fashioning the Image of the Child). This chapter reveals how modern Japanese department stores became a kind of spectacle and dreamworld experience that brought in the whole family, including children. This impacted the way the Japanese public envisioned the role and value that children played in a nuclear family as a new kind of modern family structure. The department store provided aspirations for how parents could educate and culture their children through consumption and the experience of the department store space. Department stores’ efforts to create a family-oriented space as well as its mission to provide education and culture to the public aligned with the proliferation of children’s magazines and print media for children during the early 20thcentury. This reveals the importance of visual materials in the social construction of the modern Japanese child and a new family identity. For example, by March 1908, Mitsukoshi (one of the pioneering modern department stores) established the Children’s section, and opened its first Children’s Exhibition the following year. While much of their facilities and business models followed Western examples, this concept of the family-oriented leisure space is a distinguishing characteristic unique to Japanese department stores. These efforts by Mitsukoshi and other stores that followed were in line with the interest in re-examining the role of children within a modern family structure for developing and modernizing Japan. On page 99, I write:

In their visualization and advertisement, early twentieth-century department stores helped fashion the picture of modern life to include children. They became the “dreamworlds” that promoted this figure of the imagined modern Japanese child and, by extension, the modern Japanese family.

To further the ‘dreamworld’ experience, department stores went above and beyond, especially on their rooftops—they had zoos, botanical gardens, water fountains, telescopes, roller-skating, sportsland, and even a cable car ride for sightseeing! Furthermore, many Japanese experienced riding the elevator and escalator for the first time in these department store spaces. Department stores also provided cafeterias and dining spaces that offered affordable Western-style food and in 1925 introduced the ‘Children’s Western meal’ (okosama yōshoku), a sampling of the latest Western foods for children. All of this kept the whole family in the department store space to spend the entire day.

Page 99 and the inclusion of the modern Japanese child into the space of the department store is a good point in the book to think about the kind of space that these new institutions created: a social space that shaped the experiences and identity of the modern Japanese audience. However, what it does not demonstrate well is the importance of design and advertising, which went hand-in-hand with creating an outlook for Japan’s new department store. What a major part of the book discusses is how department stores created alternate spaces for artmaking and exhibition to the newly established art institutions in modern Japan. Through its display spaces within the store, cultivating public advertising spaces, establishing its design department, and introducing innovative ways to solicit design ideas, department stores brought into the mainstream imported artistic styles, advanced reprographic technologies, and even avant-garde visual language. The numerous images of department store posters and advertisement, especially by Sugiura Hisui (1876-1965), Mitsukoshi’s first in-house designer of twenty-seven years and founding director of its Design department, illuminates how Hisui created a unified brand image, one of ‘total design,’ that revealed the role and mission of the Mitsukoshi department store as cultural center and beacon of modern advancement.

In addition, the final chapter (Chapter 3—Expansion and Extension: Japanese Department Stores at Home and in the Empire) reveals how in the years preceding the world wars and the Pacific conflict, the mission and role of the department store went beyond commercial purposes and functioned as national and colonial entities that reenforced such Japanese identities domestically and abroad.

This book reveals how modern design functioned as the very language in which the department store became a social space, art institution, and national structure where consumers could acquire a new social identity. Through the visual language of the modern lifestyle that department stores strove to design, at times this new ‘identity’ was modern, Western, and yet Japanese: one that the upper class could afford, the new middle class could aspire to, and even creating national or colonial identities in the years preceding the Pacific conflict.

Learn more about The Land of Happiness at The MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Cartledge's "Pericles"

Paul Cartledge is the A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, University of Cambridge. His many books include Democracy: A Life and Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece.

Cartledge applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric, and reported the following:

It might be a little bit of an Odyssean exaggeration to claim or boast that page 99 is the very best single page to introduce a browser to the delights of my new book, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric. But it wouldn't be all that far off... The fourth line (second para) of the page launches into a detailed discussion of one of the most famous buildings not just in ancient Greece but in the world even today, the Parthenon (temple of Athena the Virgin, built between 447 and 432 BCE). The discussion comes in the book's fourth chapter, entitled 'Pericles the Builder'. Others are titled 'Pericles the Demagogue', 'Pericles in the Orbit of Love', 'The Intellectual Pericles', and 'The Fictional (Comic) Pericles'. Pericles was an elite Athenian born about 495 who died - of plague - in 429. His active adult life and career spanned a proverbial 'Golden Age' of visual art, philosophy, architecture, history-writing, and drama, all focused in democratic Athens. The issues raised by the Parthenon include discussion of its extraordinary aesthetic, its huge cost, and of its symbolic and practical significance, and they all revolve around the role played in its construction by statesman and demagogue (leader of the People) Pericles. It's often forgotten that someone had to make the proposal to build it, and to build it in the way it was, others had to make the money available and monitor the public expense, others again had to hand out the contracts for labour and materials. All that within the constitutional framework of a direct democracy, instantiating the power of the Athenian People. To leave you in suspense no longer, my argument is that, though Pericles did indeed have quite a hand in the Parthenon's construction, he was not its 'only begetter'. If you require a monument of Pericles' career as a builder, then you should look rather to the (sadly lost) Odeum (Concert Hall) or to one of the Long Walls (destroyed) linking the city of Athens strategically to its port of Peiraieus rather than to the Parthenon. A famous painting by Alma-Tadema shows Pericles inspecting the newly built Parthenon under the guidance of its Artistic Director, master-sculptor Pheidias. Shown alongside him is his partner in life, Aspasia, the intellectual Greek (but not Athenian) woman with whom he eccentrically fell passionately in love and chose to spend his last two decades.

Learn more about Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael T. Bernath's "In a Land of Strangers"

Michael T. Bernath is Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of American history at the University of Miami.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, In a Land of Strangers: Northern Teachers in the Slave South, with the following results:

At its core, In a Land of Strangers seeks to understand where the idea of the South came from, when it emerged, and what it contained, and, to do so, I focus on the thousands of northern women and men who worked in the South as teachers, tutors, and governesses throughout the antebellum period. Living withing slave-owning households, these northerners were simultaneously part of and apart from southern society, and they wrote home constantly about the profound differences they perceived. In so doing, they helped to construct the idea of southern distinctiveness and to substantiate a sectional narrative that led to civil war and still lingers to this day.

Page 99 falls near the beginning of Chapter 3, “Studying the South,” which explores the many differences these teachers identified between North and South and the larger significance they assigned to those differences. Away from home, many for the first time, these mostly young, middle-class northerners were eager to document what made the South so strange in their eyes. This page mainly deals with teachers’ reactions to the southern climate. The heat and humidity, of course, were what they expected, and dreaded, but they were much more surprised and troubled by the cold. During the winters, southerners kept their houses much colder than these northerners were accustomed to, and they suffered severely and complained vociferously as a result. The baffling but universal southern custom of leaving exterior doors wide open at all times of year was particularly blamed, often attributed to the constant in-and-out of enslaved attendants as well as bizarre southern notions about air circulation. Many northern teachers struggled to convince their southern employers that they really came from a much colder climate as they sat visibly shivering in southern classrooms and parlors.

Within the larger scheme of the book, this is a relatively minor point. But while the Page 99 Test does not capture the book’s broader focus or its larger arguments, it does showcase just a few of the many differences that for these northern teachers defined the South and differentiated it from the North. Embedded, opinionated, outside observers, these northerners watched closely and commented extensively on all aspects of southern culture, society, and especially slavery, and by doing so they articulated the South in ways and with an authority that few other 19th-Century Americans could.

Learn more about In a Land of Strangers at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Confederate Minds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven B. Smith's "On Statesmanship"

Steven B. Smith is Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and co-director of Yale’s Center for the Study of Representative Institutions. His books include Political Philosophy, Modernity and Its Discontents, and Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.

Smith applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, On Statesmanship, and shared the following:

Page 99 comes approximately midway through a chapter titled “The Art of the Statesman.” Here I discuss the importance of character (ethos) for the statesman and how character is important for establishing trust between a political leader and his/her followers. Page 99 contains a vivid illustration of this point by means of a humorous anecdote about George Washington at the Constitutional Convention. Readers will love this story!

I think the Page 99 Test gives some insight into the book as a whole. My most important point is that statesmen are the educators of their peoples. They are their nations’ philosopher-kings. They provide people with the language they need to imagine what they might become. When Lincoln spoke of “the better angels of our nature,” or when FDR implored “fear not,” when JFK said, “ask not,” or when Ronald Regan spoke of a “city on a hill,” they were finding a way to connect people to their pasts and offer a glimpse of the future.

My favorite part of the book deals with whether it is possible to educate statesmen. Great leaders have been great readers of their national traditions and some have written memorable histories and autobiographies. What should the statesmen of the future be reading and what should they know? I have some thoughts but I will leave it to readers to come up with their own suggestions.

Learn more about On Statesmanship at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Thompson's "After Belsen"

Robert Thompson is a historian and Deputy Director for Public Programmes at Westminster Abbey Institute.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, After Belsen: Christian Encounters with Holocaust Survivors, and reported the following:

Page 99 of After Belsen jumps into a discussion of the Christian motivations underpinning the operations of Quaker relief workers in the aftermath of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It quotes the General-Secretary of the Friends Relief Service, who, after the Second World War, summarised the theology that had inspired their work. It applies these comments to the words of relief workers at Belsen, who related the everyday examples of how their Christianity found expression in the midst of their relief work. Eryl Hall Williams described in his diary the daily meetings where the team would meet at 9 o'clock every evening for their silent service. Page 99 ends with his colleague Beth Clarkson's comment that she was so exhausted from a day's work at liberated Belsen that in these meetings she would often fall asleep.

The first sentence of page 99 of After Belsen suggests why the test is not completely helpful for this book: the use of an abbreviation which has been explained on a previous page! A reader picking up the book at this point would have to flick to earlier in this chapter to discover that "FRS" stands for the Friends Relief Service, the team under discussion on this page. Another potential stumbling block is that this page makes a simplified reference to a subject by their surname, when their full name has been introduced earlier. Page 99 can therefore raise further questions than answers.

However, from absorbing the detail of page 99 I think the reader would get a good sense of the book's broader themes. In discussing the Christian motivations of the FRS and how they materialised at liberated Belsen, it shines a light on one example of Christian action in the context of the Holocaust. After Belsen aims to uncover the personal stories of Christians who encountered survivors, and explore what motivates someone to act in the ways they do. Here on page 99 we find one such example.

Clarkson's final, very human comments about falling asleep in a Christian service illustrate further the multilayered ways in which these individuals began to respond to what they witnessed through their encounters with survivors after Belsen. Their responses were complex, surprising, and they speak of the realities of human interaction in the face of suffering. They often reveal further questions then they do simple answers. As a consequence, I hope a reader who turns to page 99 would be intrigued enough to start again from page 1.

Learn more about After Belsen at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue