Dan Royles's "To Make the Wounded Whole"

Dan Royles is assistant professor of history at Florida International University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, and reported the following:

Opening to page 99 of To Make the Wounded Whole, a reader would find themselves toward the end of the chapter on Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), an advocacy organization for Black gay, bisexual, and same-sex desiring men based in New York City. Here I describe some of the ways that GMAD leaders drew on the work of artists and writers in the Black gay renaissance of the late 1980s and early 1990s to argue that self-esteem and community-building were essential to HIV prevention among their constituents, many of whom felt alienated by both Black homophobia white gay racism. Toward the bottom of the page, I also signal the financial struggles that plagued GMAD from the middle 1990s and onward, as the group struggled to stay afloat while the funding environment for HIV prevention changed dramatically.

This page would give the reader a good idea of what To Make the Wounded Whole is about, as it speaks to one of the book's central arguments: that African American AIDS activists renegotiated the boundaries of Blackness with respect to queer sexuality as they struggled against a deadly epidemic. The funding woes that GMAD experienced were also by no means unique; many of the other groups that I discuss at length similarly struggled to attract and retain funding. This was particularly true for the grassroots organizations that formed to fight AIDS in Black communities but lacked expertise in managing large grants. This thread, about how the political economy of HIV/AIDS funding has limited the work of Black AIDS service organizations, is another theme that runs throughout the book.

That the Page 99 Test works well for To Make the Wounded Whole is at least partly a function of its structure, which consists of seven discrete (but interlocking) stories of African American AIDS activism, from roughly 1985 to 2008. Each of these can be read on its own but together they sketch a network of activists confronting AIDS who attended workshops together, exchanged correspondence, and shared strategies for fighting AIDS in Black America and throughout the African diaspora. Their story has been too little told, and with To Make the Wounded Whole I aim to open up a conversation about what it means to write AIDS history with Blackness at its center.

Learn more about To Make the Wounded Whole at the University of North Carolina Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sumbul Ali-Karamali's "Demystifying Shariah"

Sumbul Ali-Karamali is a Muslim American who grew up in California, answering questions on Islam ever since she can remember. After becoming a corporate lawyer, she earned an additional degree in Islamic law. She specializes in synthesizing academic material for general audiences and is the author of The Muslim Next Door and Growing Up Muslim. A popular speaker on topics related to Islam and Muslims, she hopes to promote intercultural understanding with her work, at least when she’s not watching Star Trek reruns, listening to opera, or (reluctantly) white-water rafting with her husband.

Ali-Karamali applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Demystifying Shariah: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It's Not Taking Over Our Country, and reported the following:

Opening my newest book to page 99 would put you smack in the midst of a discussion on how colonialism affected Muslim women’s rights. It’s a fascinating story, but not one we learn in school: how European colonization of Muslim lands often stripped Muslim women of rights they had had since the 7th century, such as the right to retain and manage their property upon marriage – a right Muslim women had over a thousand years before Englishwomen would finally get it in the 19th century. Page 99 also discusses how colonial stereotypes of Muslims (often irrational even centuries ago) are still alive and plaguing us today in Europe and America, affecting us all and our ability to understand one another.

Although page 99 is essential to my book and – I hope – riveting, it doesn’t really represent the whole of the book, which is an introduction to Islam and Muslims with a focus on shariah. Although sometimes translated as “Islamic law,” shariah has not fixed meaning and loosely just means “Islam.” Demystifying Shariah is about how the word “shariah” was deliberately made into a scary concept in the West, how it can never take over our country, what it is exactly, and how Muslims engage with it. It’s about the sensational “Islamic” punishments we hear about, like stoning. It’s about how shariah is really a mass of religious guidelines covering personal conduct: how are Muslims obligated to dress, what’s allowable for us to eat, how do we think about women’s rights, and what are Muslim views on LGBTQI rights? What does shariah say about words we hear all the time, like jihad? How are Muslims supposed to treat those who are not Muslim?

Those are the questions I discuss in my book, in a conversational style filled with stories and anecdotes. And the odd Star Trek example. And even some humor. All aimed to give you a picture of what it’s like to be Muslim.

Despite the easy tone of the book, page 99, like the rest of the book, is based on settled academic research – hence the 800-plus citations in the endnotes. But it’s still written for the general reader.

I had two main goals in writing my book. My first was to write a book that was enjoyable to read. My second was to answer the kinds of questions I’ve been asked my whole life, as a Muslim American woman and, later, as someone with a degree in Islamic law. I hope you’ll find that I’ve accomplished both my goals!

Learn more about the book and author at Sumbul Ali-Karamali's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Muslim Next Door.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacob Darwin Hamblin's "The Wretched Atom"

Jacob Darwin Hamblin is an American historian who is a professor at Oregon State University. He writes and speaks about international dimensions of science, technology, and the environment, especially related to nuclear issues, ecology, oceans, and climate.

Hamblin’s books have drawn from archival research in several countries, primarily in North America and Europe. His main research languages are English and French. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Science, and Salon, and his peer-reviewed essays have appeared in Diplomatic History, Isis, Environmental History, Technology & Culture, and many other academic journals. He is the recipient of the American Historical Association’s Birdsall Prize (for best book in military or strategic history) and the History of Science Society’s Davis Prize (for best book for a general audience).

Hamblin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The idea of the Asian Nuclear Center was hatched by political operators, not scientists, and with little specificity. First, it was unclear what kind of work would occur at the center. Second, and more important, Hollister had not said where the center would be located—and it sparked an immediate competition for hosting it. One possibility was Pakistan, already negotiating with the Americans for a research reactor, and on the verge of creating its own Atomic Energy Commission. Another was Ceylon, whose capital Colombo already enjoyed a symbolic position as a center of Asian cooperation. Another was Japan, where Matsutarō Shōriki was doing his best to set the political stage for atomic energy. Like many others, Shōriki viewed hosting the center as a prize to be won. Of course another possibility was India, with its strong community of physicists and Homi Bhabha’s demonstrated leadership during the Geneva conference.

Despite the appearance of high-stakes competition, the United States already had decided where to locate the center. Tho choice was obvious only to Americans: the Philippines. It was a country relatively free of any troubling Bandung-like notions, it was amenable to promoting a positive cornucopian message, and it was easy to control. The country had become independent of the United States in 1946, with many strings attached—such as the retention of US military bases and guarantees of access to Philippine natural resources. The United States maintained close watch and control over the country, its most reliable foothold in Asia.

Does the page 99 test work for my book? The answer is… sort of! Browsers who open at this page will be treated to something they’ve probably never heard of (the Asian Nuclear Center) which in a book about nuclear topics is rare indeed. So that’s a win! The passage is about where to put the center, what it should do, and why it mattered in the 1950s. Is that what the book is about? No. But my book is definitely about the US’s promotion of atomic energy all over the world and especially in the so-called developing world, where issues of race and colonialism intermixed with the deployment of science and technology in unexpected ways. The Asian Nuclear Center was a great example of that! US government officials hoped the center would be a tangible “peaceful” use of atomic energy at a time when they were ramping up weapons tests, even though neither the diplomats nor the scientists involved had any idea what they wanted to do with it.

The passage doesn’t convey the book’s claims, but there are hints, as it mentions the importance of spinning atomic energy in a “cornucopian” way, as a pathway to peace and plenty. And despite the dizzying array of countries and characters mentioned in the quoted passage, it gives a sense of the narratives discussed elsewhere in the book about Japan, India, and Pakistan. I’m particularly excited to see what readers think about these parts of the book, and about topics that aren’t hinted at here, such as the links to petroleum, environmental issues, and wars in the Middle East. What I think makes the passage a good candidate for the page 99 test is its tone, pointing to atomic energy as propaganda, to the cynical use of reliable allies such as the Philippines, and to the interweaving of atomic energy issues with other critical matters of the time such as the “troubling Bandung-like notions” about race and colonialism.

Visit Jacob Darwin Hamblin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan E. Robins's "Oil Palm: A Global History"

Jonathan E. Robins is associate professor of history at Michigan Technological University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Oil Palm: A Global History, and reported the following:

Dropping in at page 99 of Oil Palm puts the reader in the thick of the oil palm’s encounter with European colonialism—or rather, encounters between colonizers and the people living with oil palms in the tree’s native range in western Africa. French colonizers had big plans for the oil palm, the plant that produces palm oil, but they ran into many obstacles, not least from colonized people themselves. The failure of colonial experiments in Africa ultimately led to the development of oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia, where today’s oil palm industry is concentrated.

There’s a lot of history in earlier chapters that explains how we get to the events on page 99 [inset, left], and a lot of changes in the chapters that follow. But the page does touch on two key themes of the book. First is the notion that oil palms were wild, forest trees, most of which went wasted by Africans. The first half of the book, where page 99 falls, attacks this idea and the misguided, racist policies that grew out of it.

The second theme is power. On page 99 we see anecdotes about communities defending their rights to palm trees in the face of colonial land-grabs. The page closes with the failure of a machine that was supposed to replace human labor. As later chapters show, the success of oil palm as a crop and the distribution of the wealth it produced always hinged on power: who could control land, and how much influence individuals had over their own labor power.

Learn more about Oil Palm: A Global History at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frank L. Holt's "When Money Talks"

Frank L. Holt is Professor of History at the University of Houston. His books include The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man's Wealth Shaped the World, Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan, and Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan. In addition to his large body of academic work, Holt is also a prolific writer for the public, with essays appearing in Newsweek, American Scientist, Archaeology, History Today, Archaeology Odyssey, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Saudi Aramco World, and other widely read publications.

Holt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics, and reported the following:

Every academic discipline has dark corners in need of illumination. Numismatics (the study of coins) is no exception. Page 99 of When Money Talks reveals the “sad legacy of racialized numismatics” emanating from the work of eugenicists Sir Francis Galton and Sir Flinders Petrie. Both men studied coin portraits to measure in the faces of ancient rulers their intelligence and aptitude. Plying the pseudoscience of physiognomy and phrenology, they encouraged scholars to help map racial and criminal types using the kinds of eyes, lips, ears, and foreheads illustrated on coins. These efforts could allegedly show how wise was Augustus, how witless was Claudius, how wicked was Nero, and how wanton was Cleopatra. Page 99 points out that the dangers of such thinking project both forward and back -– that the still-current belief in the predictability of character, for instance relying on facial appearances to screen job applicants for future employment, has a similarly unfortunate corollary in accepting the likeness on a coin as reliable evidence for an ancient person’s character and personality. Page 99 gives the example of King Antimachus, an ancient Greek about whom we know nothing beyond his coinage; nevertheless, numismatists continue to read into his portrait a complete personality profile. They assess the king’s sense of humor, intelligence, and religious beliefs based solely on his smile. These ‘facts’ then support a narrative of the king’s reign that reads more like a bad novel than good numismatics. Typical of the book, this page includes a photograph of the coin in question.

Page 99 fairly represents one important aspect of this book, namely its necessary critique of poor methodologies still sometimes practiced in numismatics. On the other hand, the book offers fulsome praise for the scholars and collectors whose innovative approaches and industry have made numismatics such an important contributor to the humanities and the social sciences. It highlights the achievements of many numismatists ranging from Aristotle and Jesus to Joseph Eckhel and Philip Grierson. There are lighter moments, too, that reference Harry Potter, The Beatles, movie pirates, and TV sit-coms. Funded by a Public Scholars grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the aim of the book is to introduce a discipline often ignored or misunderstood to a wide-ranging audience. Numismatics may sound mind-numbing, but it certainly is not. For all its faults, as page 99 attests, it is a subject of interest to anyone who has ever held a coin and wondered about its history.

Learn more about When Money Talks at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Treasures of Alexander the Great.

--Marshal Zeringue

John V. Petrocelli's "The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit"

John V. Petrocelli is an experimental social psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University. His research examines the causes and consequences of BS and BSing in the way of better understanding and improving BS detection and disposal. Petrocelli’s research contributions also include attitudes and persuasion and the intersections of counterfactual thinking with learning, memory and decision making. His research has appeared in the top journals of his field including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Petrocelli applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Social psychologists refer to the mental tension created when someone simultaneously holds two conflicting thoughts as cognitive dissonance. The act of fact-checking questionable beliefs is in contradiction with one’s desire to hold those beliefs because fact-checking may prove those beliefs wrong. People are motivated to reduce cognitive dissonance when it emerges or prevent it from emerging in the first place. Rather than admitting their mistakes and letting go of bullshit-based beliefs, people tend to double down on their beliefs and rationalize contradictory evidence in order to reduce dissonance. For the very same reasons, while political conservatives sort of know that Pope Francis didn’t endorse Donald Trump as he campaigned for the presidency, and that Hillary Clinton wasn’t directing a pedophile ring out of a Washington, DC, pizza parlor, they really want it to be true. They prevent dissonance from emerging altogether by not bothering to factcheck these claims. They’d rather believe this bullshit because it fits perfectly with what they’d like to believe about these presidential candidates.

Although bullshit-based beliefs can persist in the face of scientific evidence, they shouldn’t. Holding some bullshit-based beliefs will only lead to greater bullibility and suboptimal judgments and decisions.

I believe page 99 of The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit only moderately supports the Page 99 Test. Page 99 is the final page of a chapter entitled “Bullibility: Bernard and His Bullible Gang” and it is specific to motivational bullibility, or a preference for bullshit over truth and facts. Although some people repeatedly fall for deceptive influences, most everyone behaves in a gullible fashion on occasion. More generally, research suggests that many people suffer from bullshit blindness, or bullibility—accepting bullshit as fact by failing to infer from available social cues that the bullshitter has a disregard for the truth or has failed to take reasonable action to find truth. A gullible individual may believe something despite signs of dishonesty, but the bullible individual is a relatively lazy thinker who doesn’t even care about signs of dishonesty. Page 99 deals with the motivational reasons people are bullible. Although page 99 is part of but one sub-section on bullibility (motivational) and there are four others (personal, contextual, emotional, and cognitive), it does represent the quality of the whole in the way of its completeness. However, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit offers readers much more, including when bullshitting behavior (communicating with little to no regard for truth, genuine evidence, or established knowledge and talking about things one knows little to nothing about) is most likely to occur, the many unwanted consequences of bullshit, how best to detect bullshit, and how best to dispose of this most insidious communicative substance at work, home and play.

The reasons people fall for unwanted bullshit—permitting it to affect their thoughts, feelings, behaviors and decisions—have to do with the imperfections in their thinking, untrained critical thinking/inferential tools, and the questions they fail to ask bullshitters. Although people are generally reasonable under ideal conditions of data collection, they are often confined to the irresistible products of their own personal experiences. They are not always the products of irrationality, but of flawed rationality because personal experience is a problematic data collection method. Instead of providing us with clear information that would enable us to “know better”, personal experience often provides us with messy data that are random, unrepresentative, ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent, indirect (secondhand), unpalatable. When people rely on messy data for the development and maintenance of their most confident beliefs, rather than the fuller picture of truth, they become subject to bullshit. The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit details research-based habits that will help anyone weed out bullshit and make smarter decisions.

Visit John V. Petrocelli's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cary Federman's "Democracy and Deliberation"

Cary Federman is associate professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University and the author of The Body and the State: Habeas Corpus and American Jurisprudence and The Assassination of William McKinley: Anarchism, Insanity, and the Birth of the Social Sciences.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Democracy and Deliberation: The Law and Politics of Sex Offender Legislation, and reported the following:

Unfortunately, the University of Michigan Press put my case law citations to chapter 2 on page 99. But if we look at pages 94 and 101, the two pages that directly precede and succeed page 99, we get a fair appraisal of what could have been on page 99.

Page 94 is the conclusion to chapter 2, called “Confining the Mentally Ill and Dangerous.” That chapter concerns the arrest of Terry Foucha, who was found guilty of breaking and entering. Foucha pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and was put into a mental facility. After two years, he claimed he was no longer insane and so he petitioned for release. The Supreme Court held that Louisiana could not hold Foucha for being dangerous without finding a mental disorder. The case is important for sex offender law because it provides the required legal analysis for all future postconviction civil commitment cases that rely on mental disorders to establish the dangerousness of sex offenders. Page 101 is the first page of chapter 3, and it is equally 99-ish, as it describes how the Supreme Court and the states have defined the psychopathic offender in sex offender civil commitment cases.

Apart from examining the constitutionality of sex offender laws, including going over the psychological literature regarding mental disorders, the book also analyzes the constitutionality of residency restrictions, which restrict where convicted sex offenders can live and work, and registration requirements, which require that released sex offenders must register with their local police departments.

All in all, the two pages that straddle page 99 are good summaries of the book itself.

Learn more about Democracy and Deliberation at the University of Michigan Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Assassination of William McKinley.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary T. Boatwright's "Imperial Women of Rome"

Mary T. Boatwright is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Duke University. Her books include Peoples of the Roman World and (with Daniel J. Gargola, Noel Lenski, and Richard J. A. Talbert) A Brief History of the Romans.

Boatwright applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Imperial Women of Rome: Power, Gender, Context, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Imperial Women of Rome: Power, Gender, Context is near the end of “Imperial Women within the Imperial Family,” the chapter that assesses the traditional importance of family and procreation in ancient Rome, the enhancement and modification of these values by the first emperor Augustus both publicly and for his own extended family, and the developing distinction of the “imperial family” as divine. Page 99 concludes discussion of this last phenomenon by citing second- and third-century (AD) inscriptions; then, asking “What roles could women have within this within this “August” or “divine” household of the emperor, who was both paterfamilias and pater patriae?”, it turns directly to the imperial mother, one pronounced function of imperial women.

This test provides merely a partial idea of my book, since page 99 serves larger, interconnected arguments. It figures in one chapter of the assessment over time of the visibility and agency of Rome’s best documented women, those connected by blood or marriage to the emperor. The book regularly toggles between Livia, Agrippina, and other such elite women themselves, and the evolving institutions of the Roman empire shaping their lives and choices.

Page 99 reflects my goal of assessing change and continuity over time, my constant recourse to ancient evidence, and my insistence on showing women as participants in Roman history. The page also accurately reflects my focus on the systemic nature of the factors affecting the lives and history of Roman women, as well as their interconnection. On the other hand, I fear page 99 might mislead a browser to conclude that the book is dry factual history: the page does not include one of the book’s 40-some illustrations and maps, and it is not from one of the vignettes of an imperial woman that open each chapter and personalize its institutional subject (e.g., family; law; religion). The new section it begins is entitled “The imperial mother,” not something like “The criminality of Domitia Longina” that appears elsewhere. The page even lacks the name of an imperial woman! But this absence signals the challenges of exploring the history of Roman women, individuals severely restricted by law and custom and typically ignored, downplayed, or disparaged in the ancient sources that overwhelming reflect a bias towards Roman men and their perspectives.

Learn more about Imperial Women of Rome at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Will Mari's "The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960"

Will Mari is Assistant Professor of Media Law & History at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, and author of A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies: 1960–1990.

Mari applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Gelb observed that his new companions in a Lower East Side police station’s reporters’ “shack” had been hired for “their street smarts and ability to ferret out facts swiftly.” Many were the sons of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, had not finished high school, and were “dese, dem, and dose kind of guys.” They often shared the same backgrounds as the police and criminals they covered. Communicating with the newsroom could be challenging, as some of the field reporters had thick accents. Once, a leg man’s report that a woman had died at the hands of a “poisson” (person) or “poissons” unknown had translated into the headline “Funeral Follows Inquest with Verdict of Death by Poison.” Gelb, having gone to college, was initially regarded with suspicion in this environment. He had to show that he could report despite his education. Work in the field, and hunting down facts for the crime beat, was considered such a part of the job that “legging” became shorthand for this kind of reporting.

Others distinguished leg men from “the routine men,” “the specialists,” “investigators,” and “dynamiters”—while the latter group could “blast out the stories that are hard to get,” members of the first group “do the running around” needed to find details about breaking-news stories. Despite the humble status of the leg man, he or she was expected to travel constantly from one news source to the next, “and is always expected to be miraculously on the scene of every newsworthy incident practically immediately on its happening.” Sometimes also called a “district” or “beat” reporter (though not to be confused with an older and more educated beat reporter), he or she would occasionally work alongside a dedicated police-beat reporter. Familiarity with sources, including the constant making of rounds, was crucial foundational work for a good leg man. Knowing ordinary police officers, neighborhood-level politicians, local shop owners, and the various individuals who hung out at quasi-legal watering holes could lead to solid sourcing when the time came. Relying on carefully cultivated friendships with police officers, but also knowing when and how to bluster, bully, or appeal to their bosses, fell within the general sphere of the leg man or woman.

I think this short selection of text from page 99 of the book works rather well, to capture some of the main missions of my book -- I'm very focused, for example, on the community (or rather, communities!) of news workers toiling in and out of the newsroom during the midcentury in the United States. This group of workers transitioned from a largely working-class to a more white-collar community, over time, and I think that socioeconomic shift is a bit underappreciated. My media history tries to move the conversation back to how the backgrounds of news workers mattered, in the production and reception of industrialized journalism during this era.

When thinking about newsroom work culture, I also think the temptation for media historians (including myself!) was to think about the period from the 1920s through the 1960s as sort of static, with journalism not really changing -- that was definitely not the case -- this half-century or so chunk of time was fully of dynamic changes, including the introduction of key technologies, such as the radio car and early experiments with portable ("mobile") tools, like microphones and typewriters, but also movements like unionization and college education for news workers. I would be remiss if I didn't point to the work of scholars such as Julia Guarneri, Matthew Pressman and Michael Stamm, who've also looked at this transitional period.

Follow Will Mari on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allyson Brantley's "Brewing a Boycott"

Allyson P. Brantley is assistant professor of history and Director of Honors & Interdisciplinary Initiatives at the University of La Verne.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Brewing a Boycott captures the complicated history of the multi-decade Coors beer boycott remarkably well. This page comes at the end of the fourth chapter, which was by far my favorite to write. The chapter details a boycott episode that united labor, LGBTQ+, Latinx, and other activists of color in San Francisco between 1973 and 1975; together, they targeted Coors for allegations of anti-unionism and anti-gay, conservative politics. Page 99 underscores the difficulties of maintaining this boycott coalition after a major labor union, the Teamsters, withdrew its support from the effort in 1975. At the same time, it highlights the enthusiasm of many allies to keep up the pressure on the Coors Brewing Company. Here’s an excerpt:

Indeed, very few coalition members accepted the news that the boycott was over simply because the [Teamsters] said so. Without any settlement regarding contracts or affirmative action, Coors remained a target. And as Joe Coors’s nomination to the board of the [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] dominated the news in the summer and fall of 1975, many leftists, union members, and gay activists reaffirmed their commitments to the boycott and the relationships they had built in its service. Others also joined the fray, angry at Coors and spurred to action through activist networks and new revelations about the family’s conservative politics and discriminatory practices. A columnist for the Bay Area Reporter argued that “in supporting the Coors Corp. (which also owns TV stations), or any other discriminating business, we are keeping our lives, our existence in the dark ages.” To boycott, then, was a “vote against discrimination.”

While the localized fight against Coors in San Francisco came to an end in 1975 – due to top-down pressure from union leaders – the boycott itself carried on because of activists’ perceptions of it as an accessible, compelling way to fight for their lives and against conservative forces.

This tension between institutional efforts to end the Coors beer boycott and grassroots activists’ unceasing enthusiasm for it would repeat itself multiple times over subsequent decades (and throughout the next 100 pages of the book). Page 99 of Brewing a Boycott helps to reveal that the history of the Coors boycott is not a black-and-white, good-or-evil story. The boycott was a complicated movement, waxing and waning from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Over multiple decades, its organizers scored some victories and faced some bitter losses – thus revealing the complexity of the American left, the challenges inherent in coalitional activism, and the growing power of corporations and conservatives in the late 20th century United States.

Visit Allyson Brantley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael K. Miller's "Shock to the System"

Michael K. Miller is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Shock to the System: Coups, Elections, and War on the Road to Democratization, and reported the following:

Shock to the System is all about changing people’s ideas about how democratization happens. Page 99 comes in the middle of the third chapter on how major violent events like coups, civil wars, and assassinations precede democratization surprisingly often. Combined with their international counterparts (like loss in a foreign war), these violent “shocks” occur before nearly three in four democratic transitions since 1800.

Specifically, page 99 is near the beginning of the discussion of civil wars. Unfortunately, that beginning has one page of lit review and that page is number 99. Sometimes the roulette wheel lands on green. I give a brief idea of how previous scholars have connected civil wars and democratization:

At first glance, civil wars present an unlikely starting point for democratization given the extent of violence and difficulty of compromise in such polarized contexts. Yet several scholars argue that civil war can provide a democratic opening by creating a power balance between the state and rebels, or at least sufficiently threatening elites that they prefer conceding to democracy. From there, the warring parties can agree to a mutually satisfactory democratic bargain.

I proceed to mention several empirical findings showing that civil wars, at least in the right contexts, can increase the likelihood of democratization. In addition, I mention the large literature on “power-sharing,” political strategies prominent in post-civil war peace-building that try to limit the concentration of power and encourage prior combatants to buy into democracy.

The page 99 test nicely showcases a major theme of the book: power. My central argument is that violent shocks encourage democratization by disrupting autocratic regimes and leaving them insecure in power. As a result, giving in to democratization is less of a sacrifice and may even be a salvation. The same power logic explains the other major path to democratization, in which a ruling party voluntarily allows the transition because its leaders believe (correctly) that they will continue to compete and win power in democracy. Once again, the context limits the loss of power, smoothing along the transition.

Although it captures the logic, the content of page 99 is misleading as the book is not lit-review heavy. Most of this civil war section is on specific cases, with the most attention on Nicaragua’s transition after the Sandinista victory and the Philippines’ democratization during a brutal Communist rebellion. Later in the book, I confirm quantitatively that civil wars predict democratization, with the effect mostly limited to the aftermath of stalemates.

Follow Michael K. Miller on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kristy L. Slominski's "Teaching Moral Sex"

Kristy L. Slominski is the Assistant Professor of Religion, Science, and Health in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. She is a historian of how religion and sexuality have intersected with science and health in the United States. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she specialized in North American religions and completed a Feminist Studies Emphasis and a Certificate in College and University Teaching.

Slominski applied the “Page 99 Test” to Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States, her first book, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In addition to mitigating criticisms aimed at medical measures, the military used moral education to justify other uneven practices in its sex hygiene program. More specifically, racist assumptions about who was best served by moral education guided the disproportionate use of preventative measures among white soldiers and disciplinary measures among black soldiers, who were segregated into different units. Whereas white soldiers were seen as redeemable, African American troops were often portrayed as a lost cause when it came to venereal disease. Higher rates of venereal disease flourished among black soldiers based on lower entrance standards for their physical exams and substandard medical treatment once enlisted, including stories of reused, unsterilized syringes. Racist stereotypes about unrestrained black sexuality led to limitations on vacation leave and forced treatment with chemical prophylaxis even if the soldiers claimed to be abstinent during their time away from base. At the same time, recreation and entertainment opportunities were severely lacking compared to those available to white soldiers. Moral education about sexuality was likewise imbalanced, in part because of the small numbers of black chaplains and YMCA representatives available to black soldiers. Just over eighty black YMCA secretaries aided the American Expeditionary Force compared to nearly 13,000 white secretaries, and most of these secretaries were not trained to provide sex education beyond distributing pamphlets. Although the number of black chaplains serving in the war rose from approximately twelve to sixty- three over the course of 1918, the rate still remained embarrassingly low.

The cooperative campaign to combat venereal disease through sex education, recreation, medical interventions, and legal measures became known as the “American Plan,” in part to contrast it with the French plan of regulated prostitution. It would also extend the military battle against syphilis and gonorrhea to the American public. Although the engineers of the American Plan considered it morally superior for refusing to believe in the inevitability of prostitution, critics pointed out its similarities with French approaches by calling it neo-regulationism. Resistance came from British social purity reformers and the Purity Federation, an American purity group that had not merged into ASHA and that included leaders such as B. S. Steadwell and, at one point, doctor and Methodist missionary Katharine Bushnell. They opposed the American military’s reliance on prophylaxis, which they viewed as perpetuating soldiers’ visits to prostitutes and upholding a double standard of sexual morality. They also lamented the horrific treatment of women under the American Plan, including the violation of individual rights….

The page 99 test works relatively well for Teaching Moral Sex—I would give this test a B. The page introduces readers to many of the key themes of the book, especially the interaction between moral education about sex and medical approaches to syphilis and gonorrhea in the early phases of sex education. Sex education was largely focused on venereal diseases and prostitution in its early history, and the military was one of the first arenas where early public sex education developed, so the topics on this page are highly relevant to the work as a whole. It mentions major characters whose Christian influences shaped early sex education, including YMCA lecturers, military chaplains, and purity reformers. It is also significant that ASHA (the American Social Hygiene Association) is mentioned here, as it was the national organization that founded and led the movement for public sex education for half a century.

I rated this test a B because page 99 might lead readers to assume that the book focuses more on the racial inequalities of sex education than it actually does. This page provides important examples of how the deeply racist assumptions of white sex educators impacted African Americans. The rest of the book focuses more on white sex educators and how they shaped cultural norms at the national level. Page 99 also does not mention “religion” directly. The main religious influence that shaped movements for public sex education was liberal Protestantism, and this excerpt provides a small window into some of its moral education and beliefs.

Since Teaching Moral Sex covers 150 years of sex education history, this page is more representative of the book’s coverage of early sex education—before family life education of the mid-twentieth century and the rise of comprehensive sexuality education and abstinence-only education in the late twentieth century. In the more recent phases, “public sex education” comes to be associated with public schools, so the longer book explores this trajectory from community-based campaigns to struggles over K-12 curricula.

Visit Kristy L. Slominski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Fortmueller's "Hollywood Shutdown"

Kate Fortmueller is an assistant professor in the Department of Entertainment and Media Studies in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production.

Fortmueller applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID, and reported the following:

My acknowledgements, which begin on page 99 open: "First and foremost, thank you to all the essential workers who provide care labor and sustain the national infrastructure for those of us who were able to work from home throughout the pandemic."

Page 99 is inscrutable from the perspective of the book's argument but reveals Hollywood Shutdown to be a unique academic book. First of all, this book is very short (the conclusion ends on page 98). The acknowledgements begin at the end of the book, which is common placement for fiction or popular non-fiction, but not academic books. Finally, the acknowledgements clearly explain that this book about Hollywood in the pandemic was written during the pandemic. My goal as the author was to write something accessible in tone and length that can initiate broader conversations about the effects and potential long-term ramifications of the pandemic for creatives and audiences. If you study media, work in media, or if you signed up for too many streaming services in 2020, this book is for you.

Learn more about Hollywood Shutdown at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Woodruff Stone's "Captives of Conquest"

Erin Woodruff Stone is Associate Professor of History at the University of West Florida.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean, and reported the following:

If a reader opened directly to page 99, they would find themselves at the end of Chapter 4, which focuses on the roles that indigenous slaves played in Spanish expeditions of exploration and conquest. More specifically the page concludes a segment discussing the power of indigenous allies, in particular the story of one Indian intermediary, Luis, who orchestrated the destruction of a Spanish settlement in the Chesapeake Bay area, the furthest north the Spanish ever ventured. The page then goes on to review the different roles that indigenous slaves took on, willingly or unwillingly, during missions of exploration from translators and guides to porters or “consolation prizes” sold at the end of unsuccessful ventures. The page then highlights the occasional opportunities available to indigenous allies during Spanish expeditions, which at times provided them with agency and power, revealing a different and neglected aspect of indigenous enslavement.

The Page 99 Test works quite well for my book. While the page is one of transition coming at the end of Chapter 4, it features several of the most important arguments and themes of the book. First, it highlights the importance of Indian slavery in the creation of the Spanish Caribbean/Empire by explaining the multitude of roles played by indigenous slaves during every part of journeys of exploration and colonization. Second, it shows the complexity of the indigenous slave trade, where some Indians were displaced multiple times, travelling across the Caribbean and even the Atlantic. This was not a simple enterprise, but one that involved many players and ports of call. Third, it underscores indigenous voice and agency.

While the indigenous perspective is difficult to find within Spanish sources, at times one can see glimpses of the indigenous viewpoint, for example in the case of “ally” Luis. Luis was captured from present day Virginia in the 1550s after which he was taken to Mexico and later Spain. During this time Luis became a central player in the attempted conquest of “La Florida” first under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, and later with a group of Jesuits. They believed that the key to successfully converting the indigenous peoples of the new world was the creation of a purely religious settlement free from Spanish military or other secular colonists and their bad influence. Thus, when the small number of Jesuits departed for the Chesapeake, they only took with them Luis and another indigenous slave. Luis was to serve as their guide and translator. Though we never hear directly from Luis, his actions speak louder than words. Only days after the mission’s arrival in Virginia, Luis ran away. He then began to organize attacks on the Jesuit settlement. Within a few months the Indians had destroyed the nascent colony in dramatic fashion; “On the morning of February 4, 1571, Luis and a large group of Indians assaulted the camp. They clubbed the Jesuits to death and beheaded others.”

In sum, the page 99 test reflects the larger themes of the book quite well, and hopefully would inspire a reader to delve deeper into the text where they would examine many more facets of the earliest indigenous slave trade and how it contributed to the formation of the Spanish Empire.

Learn more about Captives of Conquest at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anja Shortland's "Lost Art"

Anja Shortland is a Professor in Political Economy at King's College London specialising in the economics of crime. She studies private order systems in the world's trickiest markets: hostages, hijacked ships, fine art and antiquities. She researches how people work and invest in complex and hostile territories and studies trades between legal and illegal enterprises. Her previous book, Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business revealed how special risk insurance at Lloyd's of London helps to bring abducted people home safely.

Shortland applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lost Art: The Art Loss Register Casebook Volume One, and reported the following:

Page 99 takes us right into the thick of a complex art recovery case. A private British company - the Art Loss Register (ALR) - is negotiating with a shady Taiwanese businessman over the return of a set of impressionist paintings stolen from the Bellas Artes Museum in Buenos Aires. Although the paintings were obviously valuable – a beautiful Renoir portrait graces the page - the Argentinian government had been strangely reticent to authorise their recovery or indeed pay for it. On page 99 an explanation suggests itself, when the nonchalant holder reveals himself as a weapons dealer and implies that the military junta was complicit in the theft. Art had been traded for arms and a deal was a deal.

In one way, page 99 is characteristic of the book, which is based on the detailed analysis of a dozen diverse art recoveries from the ALR’s archive. The book shines a light on the dark side of the art world, where crooks and criminals try to sell stolen masterpieces, savvy traders turn a blind eye to suspicious provenances, and millionaire collectors fight tooth-and-claw legal battles for ownership of Nazi-looted artworks. The unexpected twists and turns of these underworld escapades would not seem out of place in a detective novel. Indeed, sometimes reality seems stranger than fiction…

What page 99 misses entirely is the book’s overarching theme of a commercial institution-building (ad)venture. Over the last three decades, the art market has been transformed by a revolution in social norms and the aggressive application of US law promoting the restitution of stolen artworks to their former owners. Nowadays, the moral rights of the victims of theft, looting, and genocide may well prevail against the legal protection traditionally given to good faith purchasers. The market therefore had to develop an efficient way to identify stolen, missing, and at-risk artworks and resolve outstanding title problems before each sale.

Since 1990, the ALR has created a vast database of more than 700,000 artworks registered by their former owners. It has become the arbiter of what can and cannot be sold in good faith: no reputable dealer will touch an artwork flagged up as problematic by the ALR. This creates a space for negotiation between current and former owners – with the ALR itself often taking on the role of mediator to broker just and fair solutions acceptable to both sides. Tracing how artworld disputes were resolved over time teaches us fascinating lessons about the changing nature of property rights and the laws, norms, and institutions underpinning them.

Read early reviews of Lost Art and visit Anja Shortland's faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Fortini Brown's "The Venetian Bride"

Patricia Fortini Brown, Professor Emerita at Princeton University, was Slade Professor of Fine Arts University of Cambridge in 2001 and served as president of the Renaissance Society of America. Honors and awards include Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships; the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome; the British Academy Serena Medal in Italian Studies; and the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America. A trustee of Save Venice, Inc., Brown has published extensively on Venetian art and culture. Her award-winning books include Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (1998); Venice & Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (1996); Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (1997); and Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (2004).

Brown applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Venetian Bride: Bloodlines and Blood Feuds in Venice and its Empire, and reported the following:

What drove the Montagues and Capulets to so wantonly let the blood of their patrician kin? While The Venetian Bride does not discuss Shakespeare, page 99 of my book offers the reader a sense of what was driving all that fury. Falling midway through Chapter 6, “Honour and Disgrace,” the page features the extended quotation of a petition by Count Girolamo Della Torre to the Council of Ten in Venice to quash his sentence of a 10-year exile to the island of Crete. Referring to the murder of his brother by a Savorgnan on the Grand Canal on the eve of his departure, Della Torre observes that this was only the most recent outrage in the long-standing blood feud between the Della Torre and Savorgnan families and asks for clemency. Della Torre’s petition argues:

“These crimes and enormous excesses as a legacy are not only unheard of, but also [now] executed by the brothers, Giovanni and Nicolò Savorgnan, with the firmest intention to extirpate and eliminate us from the world with all their might; and how many infinite times the two have contrived to take the life of myself, Girolamo Della Torre, as confided to friends, relatives and their authority, as documented by the cited processes; never however did they succeed to execute their spirit of malicious cruelty against my person.

So that seeing that I defended myself against their machinations with the help of God, they drove Tristan Savorgnan, executor of their most unjust appetites and desires, to murder my poor unarmed brother, and in a boat, far from any such suspicion, and above all most innocent, for whose death there were assembled in number perhaps 20 persons in two armed boats in the middle of the Grand Canal of this city, the head of which was the cited Tristan, by commission, however, and order of the above cited Savorgnan brothers, who, claiming themselves to be offended by me for the event that happened in Padua, and knowing that my poor brother and my sister with my brother-in-law had come here to accompany me to the galley, had made an insidious plot; they expected to assassinate all of them, but seeing that they could not execute their depraved design against all, they directed their arms against my brother to revenge themselves, and here one sees [that this was clearly ordered by them], because Tristan had never been offended by us; indeed none of the Della Torre have ever held any enmity toward Tristan, so he would have not had cause to be moved to commit such an assassination, one might say in the eyes of the Prince [Doge]....

Regarding this case, however, I, Girolamo della Torre, hold for certain that it will be adjudicated by the excellent Council of Ten with the severe justice merited by a crime so cruel and so horrendous that, in truth, never has anything similar been committed in Venice: that in armed boats a band of butchers equipped with firearms [that are] prohibited in the middle of Venice, have massacred subjects of this Illustrious Dominion in the eyes of all the world, even in gondolas, as one might say in their own home.

Therefore, your illustrious lords, seeing the importance of this miserable case, seeing that these Savorgnans try to extirpate and send into ruin the afflicted family of the Della Torre, [and] seeing that in our house after the death of my brother there is no one who could repair such ruin, I, Girolamo on bended knee supplicate your excellent lords for justice and piety to suspend my departure to my exile, so that I can provide for the conservation of my life and jointly be able to provide for my calamitous family, in which no one remains to govern except for my person, [and] wish for your clemency so that I could repair so many misfortunes in that brief time that would seem appropriate to your illustrious lords, to whom I humbly prostrate myself on the earth [and] recommend myself.”

I was flattered to be invited to participate in this intriguing program. I had no idea exactly what I would find on page 99, but I was happily surprised to find our protagonist, Della Torre, in court pleading for mercy, to be spared an exile that threatened to end life as he had known it. Indeed, the Page 99 test works remarkably well for The Venetian Bride. Arguably the hinge of the overall narrative, Della Torre’s petition is a predicate to the marriage that gives the book its name. His sentence would, indeed, be postponed, allowing him to pursue another strategy (albeit unsuccessful) to avoid exile by his marriage to Giulia Bembo, the daughter of an influential Venetian patrician, in Chapter 7. Without giving much away, I'll just say that while exile is not ultimately avoided, things turn out considerably better than they did for Romeo and Juliet. Without the petition, the postponement, and the marriage, there would be no book. No sojourn in Crete for both the Della Torre and Bembo families, no return to the Della Torre family properties in the Friuli -- the castle at Villalta and the palace in Udine --no stayovers in the bishop’s castle in Ceneda, perhaps no elevation of Girolamo’s brother Bishop Michele to the cardinalate, no birth of ten children who would carry on the family line for both good and ill in a saga that played out over three centuries. In a sense, the passage provides the nexus between the blood feuds that dominate the first third of the book and the melded bloodlines and the gradual embrace of the rule of law that will be the major focus of the remainder. In sum, the petition distills the human side of the conflict between the feudal values of honor and retribution of Venice’s contentious subjects on the mainland and the civic values of the Serenissima itself.

Learn more about The Venetian Bride at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Bell's "The Dalai Lama and the Nechung Oracle"

Christopher Bell is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stetson University in Florida. His research focuses on Tibetan ritual and deity cults, as well as Asian models of divinity.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Dalai Lama and the Nechung Oracle, and reported the following:

While my book focuses on the centuries-old relationship between incarnations of the Dalai Lama and human oracles for an important Tibetan god, page 99 is much more granular. The page is found near the beginning of my fourth chapter, which concerns the expansive and rich ritual calendar for the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Nechung, which has historically housed the famed medium of the Dalai Lamas. After briefly discussing the general ritual activities that Tibetan monks engage in, the page focuses predominantly on the work of an anthropologist named Urmila Nair, whose ethnographic research among Nechung monks in exile recorded the major liturgical programs of the monastery. The pages that follow continue to summarize Nair’s observations before the remainder of the chapter describes Nechung Monastery’s annual calendar of ritual and festival engagements. The core observation of page 99 – and the chapter as a whole – draws from another scholar, José Cabezón, who describes Tibetan ritual structure as “modular in nature, in that ‘subritual’ elements can be pieced together in different permutations and orders to suit different liturgical ends.”

The Page 99 Test does not work very well for my book, unfortunately, and I doubt a browser would be able to pick up on the larger arguments and focus of the monograph as a whole. I suspect as well that the casual reader would be daunted by the seemingly sudden and inexplicable names and titles that crowd page 99 – such as Pehar, Tsongkhapa, Yamāntaka, Nebesky-Wojkowitz, and Dhasa Nechung – all of which require the prefatory explanations in the book’s introduction and previous chapters to make full contextual sense. There are some obscure references as well to ontological statuses, epistemologies, and politics of spectacle. Optimistically, however, the esoteric nature of these figures and concepts, and the mystery behind their significance, may spark curiosity rather than frustration, and spur the browser on to explore the larger complex of elements that make the Nechung Oracle and the god who possesses him so important to Tibetan Buddhist history.

Despite its very particular focus, page 99 does continue an important conversation about the nature of liturgical practices and their foundational importance to the identity and annual activities of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. While the previous chapter focuses even more minutely on Nechung Monastery’s core ritual manuals, these chapters together are part of the larger structure of the book, which explores the mythologies, rituals, and institutional histories tied to the Nechung Oracle, and by extension the Dalai Lamas past and present. The book is rife with examples of how the Dalai Lama’s own incarnational history is permeated by the presence of the god Pehar, who possesses the Nechung Oracle. Furthermore, the introduction and conclusion include vivid ethnographic vignettes of how this deity and others close to him permeate Tibetan belief and practice today, and other observations collected on site in Tibet and India punctuate the chapters. Despite its nuance, page 99 and the surrounding fourth chapter nevertheless present a detailed snapshot of the dense ritual understanding needed to engage with a Tibetan god, and it alludes to the robust mythos and history out of which such spirits sprung.

Learn more about The Dalai Lama and the Nechung Oracle at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mona El-Ghobashy's "Bread and Freedom"

Mona El-Ghobashy is Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bread and Freedom: Egypt's Revolutionary Situation, and reported the following:

When Egypt’s longtime president Hosni Mubarak was toppled by a popular uprising-cum-military coup in February 2011, what followed were 30 months of relentless competition over who would rule Egypt and on what terms. Page 99 analyzes one of the most powerful contenders in that power struggle, the senior military generals who hastily came together as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and edged out Mubarak on February 11. SCAF seized executive and legislative powers and promised to hand them to elected civilian politicians within six months. The analysis plunges into why many in Egypt and abroad welcomed SCAF’s intervention rather than fearing a military dictatorship:

From page 99:

The armed forces had a distinct mystique, at once familiar and well-regarded in public culture yet insulated and inscrutable, furthering the perception that they were a professional, neutral third party ridding Egypt of a reviled autocrat. It helped that the generals’ most powerful patron swiftly certified their status as legitimate interim rulers. Hours after Mubarak’s departure, US President Barack Obama declared, “The military has served patriotically and responsibly as a caretaker to the state, and will now have to ensure a transition that is credible in the eyes of the Egyptian people.” But this is hardly the whole story of why military intervention did not immediately raise hackles.

The Page 99 Test works well, since it reflects a main feature of my book: explaining Egypt’s politics using general concepts from the historical social sciences, in this case “military involvement in politics.” The rest of the page reviews the many different forms of military involvement in a country’s politics, which helps explain why it was not immediately clear what role SCAF would play in post-Mubarak politics, which is why we see little initial opposition to the generals’ seizure of power. That changed in a matter of months.

Yet page 99 gives a distorted idea of the book as a whole. Existing studies and popular understandings tend to focus on the generals as the decisive actors, especially in hindsight given the outcome of a military coup that toppled the first elected president in 2013 and extinguished the democratic revolution. What my book does is reconstruct the hectic politics that led to this result, showing how the military and many other politically relevant actors interacted in confusing and unpredictable ways. Nearly every page of the book shows multiple actors cooperating, colliding, talking past each other, and competing to shape post-Mubarak politics. Egypt’s revolutionary situation was made not by ‘revolutionaries’ facing off against ‘the military,’ but by the simultaneous actions of civilian politicians, youth activists, police commanders, generals, civil servants, industrial workers, judges, parliamentarians, and journalists.

Learn more about Bread and Freedom at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Bass's "To End a Plague"

Emily Bass has spent more than twenty years writing about and working on HIV/AIDS in America and East and Southern Africa. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Esquire, The Lancet, Ms., n+1, Out, POZ, Slice, and has received notable mention in Best American Essays. A lifelong social justice activist, Bass has served as an external expert for the World Health Organization and is a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do Collective. She has been a Fulbright journalism scholar in Uganda and received scholarships from the Norman Mailer Writer's Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. She was the 2018-2019 Martin Duberman Visiting Research Fellow at the New York Public Library. A Manhattan native, Bass lives in Brooklyn with her family.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, To End a Plague: America's Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa, and reported the following:

From page 99:

As Fauci recalled, Bush’s domestic policy advisor Jay Lefkowitz—who’d help steer the president towards a position on stem cell research—took it a step further, asking Fauci, “What’s the moon shot here?”

Time-consuming under any circumstances, the task was nearly impossible to do in secret. In order to work up a public health moon shot and keep up with his day job, Fauci recruited Dr. Mark Dybul, a young researcher and physician in his lab, to help devise the proposal. Both men leaned on the visits they’d made to clinics in recent years. They were taken by the Ugandan example of a “hub-and-spoke”approach, in which central facilities did the lab work and stored the drugs, while more basic, distal sites provided the care. Fauci had seen Mugyenyi’s clinic; Dybul had visited Mugyenyi and also gone to Tororo, on the country’s easternmost edge, and seen a research project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that put all the medications and supplies a household needed on the back of a motorcycle ridden by a community health worker with the equivalent of a high school degree. The research project, known as the Home-Based AIDS Care (HBAC) project, was irresistible—the love child of Mother Teresa and Bruce Springsteen—and Dybul would credit it for years to come as a major inspiration.

By July 2002, as the AIDS world began packing its bags for the World AIDS Conference—which had moved from Durban to Barcelona—Fauci and Dybul had a rough sketch of a plan. Both men departed for the meeting, with Fauci assuring Dybul he would present the proposal when the time was right.

I’d left for the conference too, heartbroken over the final end of my relationship with Kate Sorensen a few months prior. We’d split in April, and I’d descended into maddened, hard-drinking sadness. “I’m wracked with grief,” I declared to a bemused, blue-eyed man at my best friend’s wedding the night before I flew to Barcelona. “Memory is a garden, eventually it becomes ground,” he replied, paraphrasing V. S. Naipaul.

Page 99 captures my book completely, and not just because it contains the phrase "the love-child of Bruce Springsteen and Mother Teresa." The first and last quotes hold the whole.

“What’s the moonshot here?” At the top of the page, Jay Lefkowitz, a senior member of the George W. Bush first term White House staff, asks Dr. Tony Fauci. It’s 2002, so of course he’s not talking about covid-19, but HIV/AIDS. The moonshot that Fauci devises—aided by activists, African physicians, nurses and people living with HIV among many others—is the largest and longest-running pandemic-fighting response in American history to date. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, was launched by George W. Bush in January 2003, and it continues to this day. If you want to understand what it means to spend money wisely on a pandemic-ending moonshot, whether covid or a pandemic of the future, the book you need may be this one—an intimate, in-depth account of America’s best historic and ongoing work on fighting AIDS.

“Memory is a garden, eventually it becomes ground,” offers a Brooklyn Irish man at the bottom of the page. He's paraphrasing VS Naipaul to me beside a bar while I tell him about the woman who’s recently broken my heart. Reader, I married him, but that’s not why this quote is such a perfect bookend for a page-length encounter with the book. Accomplished, masterful and artful, Naipaul is not a simple writer—nor is anyone writing in and about colonial and post-colonial configurations. This book puts me, a white cisgender woman who does not have HIV in her blood, in the story I’m reporting. Not to worry-it’s not about me finding myself in Africa or in the eyes of AIDS orphans, but about the messy, complex, unfinished and essential work of understanding where and who you are when you try to tell a story, whose story you’re telling, and whether you’re aware of your position—are you on solid ground? A little heartbreak, activist scheming, personal intrigue and political machinations? That’s here too, which is why one early reader has fulfilled my dream and called this a surprise beach read. Or, as I’ve been saying for years: It’s a history of America’s war on AIDS in Africa. It’s gonna be fun. (I mean the book. The topic, my life's work, is deadly serious.) And more recently: The book you need to read to understand how COVID might end, and other pandemics might be prevented, isn’t about COVID at all.

Follow Emily Bass on Twitter and visit her website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oren Falk's "Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland"

Oren Falk is Associate Professor of History and Medieval Studies at Cornell University.

He is a cultural historian of medieval Europe, educated in Jerusalem, Israel, and Toronto, Canada. He works primarily with Icelandic sagas; his recurring interests include histories of violence, gender, folklore, and ecology, as well as historical methodology. Falk has written on unexpected absences - things that ought to be there but aren't - such as wives, beards, and heirs apparent, and on equally surprising presences: pregnant warriors, sodomitic cats, and outlawed rituals.

Falk applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle, and reported the following:

What do we know about the history of violence? Less than we might think, this book argues, because – although we historians have been studying it since forever – we haven’t really analysed ‘violence’ itself as a concept. What parts of the past do we call violent? What assumptions do we take for granted when we do? How do we theorize ‘violence’ in a specifically historical way? And what is it that we explain when we write its history? Astonishingly, such questions seldom get voiced, much less debated, by historians.

This Spattered Isle proposes a cultural history model for understanding violence. Page 99 drops the reader into the middle of Chapter 2. Chapter 1 presented my model, which cuts along three axes: power (what violence does), signification (what it means), and risk (how it meshes with our sense of agency). Chapter 2, a proof-of-concept analysis of an unimportant battle no one’s ever heard of, demonstrates how the model works. By page 99 [inset left, click to enlarge], readers will have met Arnórr, a reckless chieftain willing to run great risks, and his scheming ally Sighvatr; they come together to attack Bishop Guðmundr, holed up at Helgastaðir, a farm in northern Iceland. We now witness them intensifying their assault on day two of the siege: by focusing on their risk calculus, I try to explain when and why they dialed the pressure up or down, even with victory seemingly within reach. (Only ‘seemingly’ because, as we learn on the next page, an X Factor was about to intervene, flipping their calculus on its head.)

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 then move beyond the case study method to explore the mechanics of Icelandic feuding, why medieval Iceland never experienced war, and the sagas’ zero-sum game, in which human violence elbowed natural disaster out. An Epilogue hints at the extendability of my model beyond medieval Iceland, and an Appendix looks under the hood of my source critical methods.

So, on page 99, Ford Madox Ford would find a fair representation of the book’s analytic doggedness and of Chapter 2’s close reading technique; what he’d miss out on, though, are the broad vistas that fan open in the book’s later chapters.

(Glossary of terms appearing on page 99: bœndr = farmers; goðar = chieftains; récit = the surface of a text; histoire = the text’s imaginary depth; vígflaki = mobile fortification.)

Learn more about Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland at the Oxford University Press website and follow Oren Falk on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin J. Wetzel's "Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching from the Bully Pulpit"

Benjamin J. Wetzel is Assistant Professor of History at Taylor University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching from the Bully Pulpit, and reported the following:

A reader who opened to page 99 of my book would find himself or herself in the middle of Chapter Four, a chapter dealing with domestic issues during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. In particular, the reader would find a discussion of the infamous “Brownsville Incident” of 1906, where Roosevelt dishonorably discharged a group of African American soldiers because they had allegedly engaged in a shooting spree in Brownsville, Texas. Page 99 goes over the basic facts of the case as well as its political aftermath. While Roosevelt always asserted that his actions were righteous, nearly all modern historians conclude that the soldiers’ dismissal was based on racial prejudice. The bottom of the page discusses how religious journals commented on the controversy. Some upheld the president’s actions but others criticized him for a rush to judgment.

The ”Page 99 Test” works fairly well for my book. Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching from the Bully Pulpit is a religious biography of the 26th president. As such, it covers all of the major events of Roosevelt’s life (such as the Brownsville incident) that one would expect in a standard biography. However, my book is different because it zeroes in on how Roosevelt’s religious beliefs and doubts factored into his more well-known accomplishments. The book also contextualizes Roosevelt in the American religious landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So there are quite a few examples of where the book discusses a “secular” incident like Brownsville but then seeks to understand how religious communities interpreted the incident.

The main themes of the book, however, center more on Roosevelt’s own beliefs and how they impacted his career. I argue that he was a spiritual pilgrim who, despite being a lifelong churchgoer, changed considerably in this theological beliefs. He was also a “bully pulpit preacher” who never tired of exhorting his fellow citizens to morality and who often quoted the King James Bible in doing so. Roosevelt was also a sharp defender of the separation of church and state, consistently opposing favoritism toward any religious sect. Finally, the famous president was also a religious ecumenist: that is, he urged tolerance for a wide variety of religious persuasions. While he himself remained a mainline Protestant, he supported marginalized groups like Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and Unitarians, helping move them a little closer toward the religious mainstream.

Learn more about Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching from the Bully Pulpit at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue