Jehanne Dubrow's "Frivolity: A Defense"

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of over one dozen books, including The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma (2025). Her new book of creative nonfiction is Frivolity: A Defense. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including New England Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas.

Dubrow applied the “Page 99 Test” to Frivolity: A Defense and shared the following:

From page 99:

Despite the lightness of Le nozze di Figaro, I’ve always struggled with the end of the opera: that compulsory joy, the melody tripping over itself in a rush toward resolution. It’s hard for me to forget that the Countess must trap her husband. He begs her for forgiveness, perdono, perdono, he pleads, but only after being caught in near-adultery. The Countess must force his love to grow in her direction again, the way a gardener trains a vine with a trellis, the stem of the plant bound or clipped firmly in place. She is often played by some magnificent diva like Kiri Te Kanawa or Renée Fleming, and I hate that a woman with sublime timbre and technique is brought so low that she must trick her spouse back into devotion.

I think page 99 is characteristic of Frivolity. It's a book that slides between high culture and low, between lightness and heaviness, between joy and grief. Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro certainly embodies many of the qualities that make frivolity so difficult to understand and explain. Here is an opera that took enormous skill and sensitivity to craft. It's provocative and subversive. It ruffles feathers. But it also delights and entertains and offers listeners enormous pleasure.

In Frivolity, I explore a wide range of frivolous pursuits, objects, and even people. The trick in writing the book was to use a delicate touch; the prose couldn't be ponderous. The 101 sections of the book needed to flit from subject to subject, in a way that would mirror frivolity itself. Finding a voice and a form for engaging with the frivolous was perhaps the biggest challenge of writing Frivolity. I had to figure out how to treat the subject thoughtfully, all without sounding as if I were overly serious!

Visit Jehanne Dubrow's website.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (April 2010).

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (November 2012).

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow and Argos.

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow & Lola and Bandit.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (August 2022).

The Page 99 Test: Taste: A Book of Small Bites.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jack Dudley's "The New Believers"

Jack Dudley is Associate Professor of English at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he teaches and researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. His scholarship explores the intersections of religion and literature across genres and media, with a particular interest in visual culture and film. His teaching spans a broad range of modern and contemporary literatures—including British, American, Canadian, Irish, global, and postcolonial—and he is especially known for his popular course on horror, one of his longstanding personal interests. He also works extensively with students on their writing and creative projects.

Dudley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The New Believers: Religion and the Contemporary Novel, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The New Believers drops you into a sugarcane field, which is an easy place to get very lost in. It’s a few pages into the third chapter of the book, which examines the numinous powers in Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). On this page, I compare Díaz’s description of wind as a spiritual sign of rescue in a sugarcane field with similar imagery from the writer Jean Toomer (1894-1967) and his work Cane (1923). Both writers engage in what’s called religious syncretism, which is where different religious traditions are mixed together to produce new kinds of belief and new practices. Crucially, both Díaz and Toomer treat these spiritual powers as real rather than as metaphors or uncertainties.

This page captures the book’s whole argument: our leading contemporary novelists want to imagine how belief in spiritual powers can transform the way we care for others and the world. Page 99 describes in detail Oscar’s rescue from that cane field by a remarkable, talking, supernatural-seeming golden mongoose—and then by Clives, a good Samaritan who was passing by. I next take the reader through how the passage from Díaz blends religious traditions, mixing Western Christianity with Dominican obeah (also known as voodoo).

That represents another key claim of The New Believers: what we’re seeing in these writers isn’t an uncritical return to traditional forms of religion but a new willingness to mix among beliefs and practices. As they sort through religious ideas—and invent new ones—these writers are guided by what can best help us materially care for the world and other beings.

Page 99 ends by setting up a challenge to contemporary critical practices, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, and now decolonial ways of thinking. These tend to overwhelmingly be negative modes of critiquing past and present cultural and political practices and their ways of making art, including the novel. Because they tend to focus less on their positive projects—that is, what they want to bring about and how they’ll do it—postmodernism, postcolonialism, and decolonialism have often lacked legitimation and had trouble motivating change. I call them “dismantling” projects in the book (99).

The top of page 100 outlines a claim about Díaz that applies to the whole book and that seeks to help empower these projects: believing in the reality of spiritual beings and forces can powerfully motivate what I call “projects of building and affirmation” (100), ones that can energize postmodern, postcolonial, and decolonial practices by providing them with a positive grounding in spirituality. These include better care for migrants, non-human animals, and other beings across differences.

That’s perhaps a surprising claim of The New Believers: that spiritual and religious practices and beliefs (which often get read as “conservative”) can be important sources of motivation, resilience, and community building for causes that are thought of as leftist and/or liberal.

Visit Jack Dudley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chin Jou's "Captive Consumers"

Chin Jou is Associate Professor of History at Rice University. She is the author of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help (2017).

Jou applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book falls in a chapter (3) titled, “The Institution Is Our Customer, Not the Prisoner.” This chapter title is derived from a quote that a prison food services company’s director of operations told the New York Times Magazine in 2013. Chapter 3 itself is about how jails and prisons in localities and states across the country have outsourced feeding incarcerated people to private companies in the last three decades or so, and the effects of this privatization. Page 99 is fourteen pages into this chapter, and focuses on what has happened to prison food as a result of this privatization, according to myriad sources.

Page 99 homes in on Aramark, the leading company in “correctional” food services and a name that readers may already be familiar with because of the company’s large footprint on college campuses and in office buildings, hospitals, stadiums, and numerous other arenas across the United States. This page cites news reports, a Kentucky state audit, and academic research on how prison meals changed once Aramark took over provisioning. These changes included smaller portion sizes, adding margarine to meet meals’ calorie requirements, and using less meat in recipes. (Additional changes are detailed in other pages of the book.) Sloppy joes, for instance, would include less ground beef and be diluted with more ketchup and tomato paste. University of Michigan researcher Roland Zullo, who interviewed prison guards in Michigan, found that it was not unusual for Aramark to run out of food before all incarcerated people had been served.

Page 99 provides readers with a glimpse of some of the problems with U.S. jail and prison food in the mass incarceration era (roughly the 1970s to the present), but it is incomplete. It is incomplete because the argument of this book is that prison food is a source of, and exacerbates, hunger, violence, and inequality in American carceral institutions (hence the subtitle of this book). Page 99 gives some, though not all, of the explanations for why prison food leaves incarcerated people hungry, and does not at all explain how it relates to violence and inequality in our jail and prison systems. For more on these topics, readers will just have to pick up the book…

Learn more about Captive Consumers at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Supersizing Urban America.

--Marshal Zeringue

R. Douglas Hurt's "The Country People"

R. Douglas Hurt is an emeritus professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. He is a past president of the Agricultural History Society, a former editor of Agricultural History, and a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society. He has received the Gladys L. Baker Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Agricultural History Society. He is the author of Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie, which won the Missouri Book Award from the State Historical Society and Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815–1900, which won the Jon Gjerde Book Prize presented by the Midwestern History Association.

Hurt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Country People: An Agricultural History of the American Revolution, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Country People: An Agricultural History of the American Revolution conveys subtle but ultimately profound ways that the American Revolution changed agriculture. It builds on previously discussed agricultural policy and the effects of the War for Independence to show the ways both shaped farming in South Carolina during the American Revolution. By so doing, it is thematically representative of the whole book.

Page 99 emphasizes three major agricultural changes that resulted from the War for Independence. First, the Continental Congress and Parliament closed British markets to rice farmers. Rice had been an enumerated product with a guaranteed market and sales that brought considerable income to the farmers and planters. Rice producers lost a reliable income which they only replaced, in part, by finding new markets in the non-British West Indies and beyond. Second, the war ended the production of indigo for British textile manufactures. Farmers could no longer export this dye, and the British stopped paying a bounty to farmers for its production. As a result, the war ruined this form of agriculture in the South, and it never recovered.

Third, page 99 builds on earlier discussions of American and British policy intended to gain economic advantage over the other through trade impositions. In 1774 the Continental Congress prohibited British imports including cloth and clothing. Britain retaliated by refusing to ship textiles to American ports that it did not control. As a result, South Carolina farmers and planters sought to meet this need by raising more cotton, particularly a new variety. During the war farmers began settling in the upcountry and raising a short-staple cotton. In contrast to the long-staple Sea Island Cotton, which they could not raise in sufficient quantity to meet their clothing needs, short-staple cotton produced abundantly in the upland environment. But it required considerable labor to extract the seeds from the lint. Mechanical gins were not yet available. Consequently, farmers who raised short-staple cotton had to meet their labor needs with family members or enslaved workers. As short-staple cotton production moved inland the institution of slavery moved with it. The war, then, caused a change in trade policy that resulted in an expanded agricultural labor practice that would have enormous implications for the American economy and race relations in the years ahead.

Learn more about The Country People at the University of Georgia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Yuri Pines's "China’s Aristocratic Age"

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Yuri Pines's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Everlasting Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elliott Logan's "Over and Over"

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunneva Gilmore's "Redressing Rape in War"

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.

The Page 99 Test: Like Family.

The Page 99 Test: Keeping Family Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew B. Kennedy's "Rebellious Follower"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue