Kerry Brown's "The Great Reversal"

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.

Brown applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400 Year Contest for Power concerns an assessment of the outcome of perhaps the most important single encounter between Britain and China since first contact around 1600 – the Lord Macartney embassy of 1793-4. It carries a quote from John Barrow, one of the participants of the tour, who spoke of his awe at seeing the Chinese landscape as the embassy travelled back from Beijing to southern China after meeting the Qianlong emperor, and then shows how, while in terms of trade very little had been achieved, vast amounts of the key export – tea – continued to be shipped to Britain. By 1808, this had reached half the total sent to the whole of the rest of Europe.

This is a pretty good indicator of the tenor of the book as a whole. At heart, Britain’s chief interest in China was always trade, and the main effort its government made was to improve the terms of business and access to China for its merchants. This group had dominated engagement with China from the establishment of the East India Company in 1600. Commerce had indeed figured as the main subject of the earliest attempt at high level contact – the letters sent by Elizabeth I between the 1580s to 1603. None of these ever actually arrived, however, showing that while the desire was there, the means to achieving it were limited.

Things did not improve dramatically over the ensuing two centuries. While foreigners were allowed limited rights to trade from the port of Canton in the southeast of the country, their sporadic attempts to venture elsewhere in the vast country were almost always frustrated. James Flint, one of the earliest recorded British to be able to speak some Chinese, was sent to Beijing in 1757 to try to get access to the emperor. He was exiled from the country for his effrontery, and the poor local who had helped him translate his plaint executed.

The rebuttal of Macartney’s delegation was not so dramatic, but equally as categorical. It came away empty handed, with no agreement on better direct access to the imperial court, nor the right to set up any other trading posts incountry. But it did create a set of new knowledge about China, and a better way to understand the country. In the delegation were botanists, artists, and scientists, and they were able to be directly exposed to Chinese ways of thinking and knowing for the first time. It was for this reason that one historian in the 20 th century said that the Macartney delegation was the greatest single example of two very different civilisations coming into touch with each other, and trying to work out a way of working together in modern history. That endeavour continued over the following decades and centuries, and, greatly expanded and much more complex, continues to this day.

Learn more about The Great Reversal at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roberta L. Millstein's "The Land Is Our Community"

Roberta L. Millstein is an Emerit Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC Davis, retired from teaching but still researching. She is an AAAS Fellow (since election in 2022), and is also affiliated with UCD's Science and Technology Studies (STS) Program and co-runs UCD's PhilBio Lab with Jim Griesemer.

Millstein applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, is a table (the only table in the book!) entitled, “Comparison of Leopold to contemporary ecologists with respect to topics related to biodiversity and stability.” The points of comparison in the table, elaborated in earlier text, include methodology, species studied, mechanisms, biodiversity, stability (in its broad meaning), and stability (how it manifests and is measured. The table shows in each case that Leopold’s approach is broader or more realistic (i.e., less idealized) than that of most contemporary ecologists. So, for example, with respect to methodology, instead of relying on field experiments or theoretical models, as most contemporary ecologists do, Leopold took a historical, observational, and comparative approach, including “natural experiments”; he was also a hands-on practitioner. And instead of primarily studying plant biodiversity, Leopold studied species at every trophic (i.e., feeding) level.

The Page 99 Test does not really work for my book. Page 99 does not express the main thesis of the book—it’s not directly about the land ethic—and given that it is a table, doesn’t even give a sense of the writing style used in the book. However, it is interesting that page 99 does provide an example of one of the main themes of the book. The theme is this: even though Aldo Leopold was a 20th century ecologist (among other hats he wore during his lifetime), his scientific views are not outdated and in many cases anticipated directions that ecology has—or could—go in. Previous authors criticized Leopold’s concepts of “community” and “stability” for being out of date. But they did so without really doing the legwork to figure out what Leopold meant by those terms. Instead, they assumed that he meant what other ecologists of his time meant. When you look at more of his writings, however, you realize that Leopold was an independent thinker who used scientific terms in distinctive ways.

The table on page 99 appears in Chapter 4 of 6, a chapter entitled “Land Health.” I show that Leopold used the terms “stability” and “land health” essentially interchangeably. A big chunk of the chapter is spent on figuring what Leopold meant by land health, an idea he was still working on at the time of his death in 1948. As the table indicates, Leopold’s understanding of stability/land health was the land’s capacity for self-renewal—its ability to support a diversity of life over time. In the chapter, I also discuss what Leopold thought the causes of land health were; these turn out to be soil health (he said the evidence for this connection is very strong) and what we would today call biodiversity (he thought the evidence here was not as strong, but that it was very suggestive). Contemporary ecologists have spent the last several decades disagreeing over whether biodiversity is a cause of stability, with the consensus having swung back and forth a few times. One of the things I suggest in the chapter is that ecologists might profitably consider studying his conceptions of biodiversity and stability and the underlying mechanism that he proposes for the connection between them, and indeed, a few ecologists are already doing that.

So there is a lot happening on page 99!

Visit Roberta L. Millstein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pamela D. Toler's "The Dragon from Chicago"

Armed with a PhD in history, Pamela D. Toler translates history for a popular audience, going beyond the familiar boundaries of American history to tell stories from other parts of the world as well as history from the other side of the battlefield, the gender line, or the color bar. Her work has appeared in American Scholar, Aramco World, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Ms., and Time.com. Her books of popular history for adults and children include Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War (a nonfiction companion to the PBS historical drama Mercy Street), Through the Minefields, and Women Warriors: An Unexpected History.

Toler applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Dragon From Chicago begins with the opening of the German Reichstag in October, 1930. The Nazi Party now held the second largest number of seats in the Reichstag and their entrance into the chamber was accompanied by riots on the streets and the threat of battle within the Reichstag building.

A significant part of the page describes the broader context of those riots, how Sigrid Schultz reported on political riots in Berlin, and the way those reports were received by the Tribune’s editorial desk in Chicago. Here is what the reader would find:

The violence that accompanied the opening of the Reichstag set the tone for the months to come. Riots on the streets were so routine and yet so bloody, that political parties often arranged for the presence of a Red Cross unit when organizing a demonstration. According to an official report that Schultz shared with her readers, in Prussia alone the police were called out to quell riots 2,494 times in the twelve-month period from March 1930 to March 1931.

Given the wealth of material, Schultz chose which riots she re- ported on with care. She often used them to explain the larger political and social context of Depression-era Germany. Using this technique, she described heckling on the floor of the Reichstag, explained Chancellor Brüning’s coercive and ineffective measures for reducing the costs of living and production, and introduced Tribune readers to the six million men who belonged to paramilitary organizations controlled by political parties, including the Reichsbanner, made up of members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Hitler’s Brownshirts, and the Steel Helmet, an organization of World War I veterans that began as monarchists and nationalists but became aligned with the Nazis over time. (The regular army was limited to one hundred thousand men by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.) She gave equal consideration to violence at the hands of Reds and Fascists. She also gave her readers glimpses of the National Socialist Party’s growth as a political force.

Despite the restraint Schultz showed in choosing which riots to report on, the Tribune’s editorial desk feared Chicago readers had a limited appetite for such stories. In December 1930, George Scharschug, who had replaced Joseph Pierson as cable editor, followed a compliment on her story on riots related to the Berlin showing of All Quiet on the Western Front with the statement: “Berlin riots are becoming almost a joke. They happen so frequently.”

The passage is a critical one in the book and would give the reader a good sense of what the book is about. Together, the rise of the Nazis and the fall of Weimar were the big story of Sigrid Schultz’s career, and much of the book deals with her experiences dealing with and reporting on the Nazis. It was dangerous and challenging work. She had to sift through lies and propaganda to find the truth of a story. She devised ways to get her stories out of Germany despite increasingly stringent controls on foreign correspondents. More than once she was called into Gestapo headquarters because of a story she had written.

Once her stories reached the Tribune’s offices in Chicago, Schultz faced a different type of challenge: no matter how important events were in Berlin they weren’t necessarily the most important news from the perspective of Chicago. Page 99 deals with a moment when the Chicago editorial desk directly questioned whether their readers would care.

Visit Pamela D. Toler's website.

The Page 99 Test: Women Warriors: An Unexpected History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dean Jobb's "A Gentleman and a Thief"

Dean Jobb is the author of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, winner of the inaugural CrimeCon CLUE Award for true crime book of the year and longlisted for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His previous books include Empire of Deception, which the New York Times Book Review called “intoxicating and impressively researched” and the Chicago Writers Association named the Nonfiction Book of the Year. Esquire magazine has hailed him as “a master of narrative nonfiction.” Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune and Toronto’s Globe and Mail and his monthly true crime column, “Stranger Than Fiction,” appears in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He is a professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program.

Jobb applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“He was dressed to blend in with the posh surroundings, in a blue suit, pearl-gray tie, and black homburg. A brown leather briefcase completed the businessman-arriving-home look.” Arthur Barry, a clever and prolific Jazz Age crook – Life magazine later proclaimed him “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived” – was about to pull off the most audacious heist of his seven-year-reign as the king of New York’s cat burglars.

Page 99 of my latest true crime book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, published by Algonquin Books in the U.S. and by HarperCollins Canada, plunges readers into the heart of the action. It’s 1925 and Barry is about to slip into a suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel and escape with a strand of pearls and other jewelry worth millions. His victim? Heiress Jessie Donahue, daughter of the founder of the Woolworth chain of five-and-dime stores and one of the wealthiest women in the country. For this book, the Page 99 Test works – readers who turn to this page first will catch the master burglar in the act.

Barry pulled off scores of meticulously planned break-ins on Long Island and in Westchester County, targeting the mansions and sprawling estates of New York’s ultra-rich. His victims included Percy Rockefeller, nephew of the founder of Standard Oil, Wall Street investment legend Jesse Livermore, and Oklahoma oil tycoon Joshua Cosden. When the Prince of Wales visited Long Island in 1924, he took the future King Edward VIII on a clandestine tour of Manhattan nightclubs, then stole jewelry from a member of the prince’s entourage, Lady Edwina Mountbatten.

The press dubbed him a “gentlemanly thief.” Barry sometimes donned a tuxedo and crashed parties, passing himself off as an invited guest before slipping upstairs to check out where jewels were likely to be stashed when he returned to break in. If his victims were awakened as he crept into their bedrooms, he assured them he was only there for the jewels and engaged in small talk to calm them down. Dorothea Livermore, wife of the Wall Street investor, convinced him to return two valuable rings he was about to take, claiming they had sentimental value. “I know he’s terrible,” she later told reporters, “but isn’t he charming?”

Barry’s haul of diamonds, pearls and other gems would have been worth at least $60 million today. His arrest in 1927 was not the end of his incredible story. A dramatic prison break, years as a fugitive, and a final shot at redemption lay in the future.

Visit Dean Jobb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William T. Taylor's "Hoof Beats"

William T. Taylor is an Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, whose work explores the domestication of the horse and the ancient relationships between people and animals.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, and reported the following:

The reader flipping to page 99 of Hoof Beats will encounter a two-page map spread showing how horses and horse riding spread out of Inner Asia and into Africa, and the links and trade routes created by the Silk Road, Tea Horse Road, and steppe empires. This moment in the book also marks a key turning point in the human-horse story, as the narrative shifts from an investigation into the origins of horse domestication to an exploration of the dynamic ways that horse riding built steppe empires and forged new links across the ancient world.

Turning past page 99, the reader will find themselves knee-deep in an exposition of ancient archaeological discoveries from Mongolia, the focus of my own work and the core of the book’s new scholarship. The Mongolian steppes served as the staging ground for many of the most important changes to people, horses and the ancient world – from the innovation of the saddle and stirrup to the emergence of pan-Eurasian empires and early global trade routes. I think the Page 99 Test nicely encapsulates the role of visual storytelling in Hoof Beats, and the integrated, global perspective that the book takes to understanding the human-horse relationship.

Visit William T. Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods's "Puppy Kindergarten"

Brian Hare is a professor in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, where he founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center. Vanessa Woods is a research scientist at the Center as well as an award-winning journalist and the author of Bonobo Handshake. Hare and Woods are married and live in North Carolina. They are the authors of Survival of the Friendliest and The Genius of Dogs.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Puppy Kindergarten: The New Science of Raising a Great Dog, and reported the following:

Sadly, page 99 is one of the very few pages that does not have a puppy photo, or even mention a puppy!!

It does distill a hotly debated, poorly understood, and complicated subject into a few paragraphs – how cognition and temperament fit into personality. The most helpful line I read when trying to wrestle with this topic was as psychologist David Rettew described it; if your personality is a symphony, your temperament is the key in which the symphony is played.

If I could, I would make it ‘the page 100 test’ because rapidly on the heels of page 99 comes one of my favorite tests with puppies—how they react to toy robots. Basically, we introduce puppies to various life-sized robots, some of whom dance and sing, and record what happens.

It’s a classic temperament test; psychologists have conducted similar tests with children for decades. Since your temperament is with you from a very young age and remains relatively stable, your reaction to something surprising and new when you are young can predict, to some extent, what you will be like when you get older.

We want to see if the same is true for puppies. Some puppies are friendly and kind to the robot, maybe making a deep play bow and sniffing its bottom. Other puppies are alarmed and confused and quickly ask to leave.

Watching the different puppies react to the robot and pairing this with their cognition emphasizes how each puppy is unique. This is probably one of my favorite lessons in our book - that just like kids, puppies all see the world and solve problems differently.

Visit Brian Hare's website and Vanessa Woods's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Genius of Dogs.

The Page 99 Test: Survival of the Friendliest.

--Marshal Zeringue

On Barak's "Heat, a History"

On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology and Professor of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His books include Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization.

Barak applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet, and reported the following:

Climate scientists dread vicious cycles – biophysical feedback loops that could accelerate climate change and push the Earth's system past critical tipping points. (These include melting ice exposing darker, heat-absorbing surfaces; thawing permafrost releasing greenhouse gases; and deforestation reducing carbon sequestration.) But if climate change is human-caused, what about the social and political dynamics propelling it? My book explores such cycles forming during the twentieth century and page 99 captures one of them quite effectively. It describes newly built all-season asphalt and concrete roads that connected the coastal plain and the interior in Mandatory Palestine. Unlike the old dirt roads that were impassable during winter and raised choking dust in the summer, these new infrastructures supported the expansion of economic sectors like citriculture – allowing oranges to be transported from field to harbor during the winter – and that of beachgoing during the summer. Yet built from heat-absorbing materials, the new roads contributed to the formation of heat sinks and prevented rain absorption. Moreover, they flamed the escalation in heated intercommunal clashed between minimally clothed Jews and Arabs congregating together at the beach.

As the rest of the book shows, such vicious thermo-political cycles play an unrecognized role in the history of the Middle East, a region often labeled a “hotspot” but where heat is seldom considered seriously. For example, I trace the impact of August 1929 heat on the famous riots that some historians argue triggered the conflict over Palestine. One overlooked trigger was tension surrounding fair-skinned Jewish women wearing shorts in ethnically mixed cities like Jaffa – a cooling strategy for some became a provocation for others.

Beyond Palestine, other vicious cycles include the introduction of air conditioning in Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the 1940s. This emblematic vicious cycle relied on fossil-fuel electricity for cooling while enabling oil extraction in hot regions as American oilmen in Arabia depended on their ACs. In turn, combusted oil released greenhouse gases, intensifying global warming and local heating.

The advent of mechanical cooling accelerated the shift in attitudes towards perspiration, the body's natural cooling mechanism. Heat, A History chronicles the transformation of sweat from a desirable, even erotic substance in early modern times to an abject fluid to be suppressed or masked. This shift paralleled and intertwined with the increasing reliance on fossil-fueled cooling technologies. The book posits that breaking our dependence on fossil-fueled technology requires a multi-level reconsideration of our attitudes towards heat and cooling. This reassessment must span from the individual body to the built environment and ultimately to the global scale. By recognizing how our perceptions of sweat and heat have changed over time, as well as the social and political dispositions involved, we can begin to challenge our current reliance on energy-intensive cooling methods.

Visit On Barak's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hatim Rahman's "Inside the Invisible Cage"

Hatim Rahman is an award-winning associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, and reported the following:

From page 99:

TalentFinder also retained the sole right to remove any feedback it deemed as hurting its interests:

In order to protect the integrity of the feedback system and protect Users from abuse, TalentFinder reserves the right (but is under no obligation) to remove posted feedback or information that, in TalentFinder’s sole judgment, violates the Terms of Service or negatively affects our marketplace, diminishes the integrity of the feedback system or otherwise is inconsistent with the business interests of TalentFinder.

According to this statement, TalentFinder was able to simultaneously absolve itself of the responsibility of investigating the accuracy of feedback scores while also monitoring these scores to the point that it could remove any feedback that it felt hurt its business interests. As is common with terms of services, TalentFinder’s polices allowed the platform to “have its cake and eat it too,” especially in regard to asserting control over the rating system.

None of the people I interviewed indicated that they had read any of these agreements, let alone expressed objections to them. Many scholars have commented that online contracts have been designed and implemented in such a way that users are simply conditioned to agree to terms without deliberating or reading the contract. Legal scholar Margaret Radin notes that, broadly speaking, people are subject to two different types of contractual agreements. In “agreement” contracts, either party can negotiate the terms before an agreement is reached and the contract is finalized. Think about negotiating the cost of a used car, the terms when buying a house, or even the price of a product at a flea market. These are variations of agreement contracts because such contracts are not set in stone before the contract is signed or verbally agreed to.

On the other hand, “boilerplate” contracts are standardized take-it-or-leave-it contracts that, in practice, are impossible to

Page 99 of my book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, provides background knowledge about the book’s main argument. That is, the book’s main argument is that organizations, particularly digital platforms, are using algorithms to control high-skilled workers within an “invisible cage”: an environment in which organizations embed the rules and guidelines for how workers should behave in opaque algorithms. It is ‘invisible’ because organizations can use algorithms to change the rules and criteria for success at an unprecedented speed and scale without notice, explanation, or recourse. It is a ‘cage’ because these algorithms increasingly control our opportunities without our say.

Page 99 discusses one important mechanism that enables organizations to create an invisible cage. This page shows an example of how the organization I studied uses its terms of service to accrue power over workers, and enabled the organization to make changes to the platform. Specifically, this page illustrates how the organization established the right to control information and visibility of a workers’ feedback on the platform without workers’ consent or awareness. The power to make such changes is critical because workers rely on their rating feedback to attract new clients and secure additional work. Importantly, by embedding the provision mentioned on page 99 in the terms of service, TalentFinder is creating a “digital boilerplate agreement.” The beginning of the chapter argues that these agreements are shifting terms of service that enable an organization to implement any change that further entrenches its power and information asymmetries over workers. Page 99 is indeed an important page but it does not exactly reveal the quality of the whole book, which begins by laying out the history of online labor markets and ratings, then sharing the stories of real workers on the labor market, and finally discussing the construct of the invisible cage and its ramifications on theory and practice.

The reason I think the Page 99 Test does not, overall, provide an accurate understanding of my book’s quality is because many sections of the book provide greater depth to the book’s core thesis. Without knowing the thesis, which is laid out in the beginning of the book, page 99 does not provide the best illustration of the book’s quality.

Learn more about Inside the Invisible Cage at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica L. Gaston's "Illusions of Control"

Erica L. Gaston is senior policy advisor and head of the Conflict Prevention and Sustaining Peace Programme at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a nonresident fellow at both the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Global Public Policy Institute.

Gaston applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses why the so-called “bargaining environment” in Afghanistan in 2009 was much more diverse, multi-player, and complex than in 2005 in Iraq, when U.S. military leaders in Iraq had much closer to a monopoly on military and political decision-making regarding U.S. initiatives. This page would give a flavor for the type of analysis and subject matter as a whole: it touches on two of the three main arenas for the book (Afghanistan and Iraq in periods of U.S. intervention) and also deals with the idea of bargaining debates influencing policy outcomes, which is one of the central theoretical premises. However, because page 99 offers evidence relevant to understanding only two of nine case studies, and related to a minor theoretical sub-contention, it would not necessarily give a sense of the main themes, features, or overall argument of the book. The larger focus of the book is on how a series of tactical or technical measures adopted by the United States to mitigate risks associated with irregular forces (militias, rebels and other local armed groups) often contributed to these initiatives being authorized or approved, but ultimately did little to address the risks in question. This introduced a degree of moral hazard, potentially leading the US to engage in riskier partnerships than it might have. At a theoretical level, the book tests the most common academic paradigm applied to these proxy relationships, which is principal-agent theory, against the evidence. While principal-agent theory well describes the risks involved when the US tried to delegate security and other policy tasks to these irregular forces, it does not do a good job of explaining why the US imposed such a range of checks and controls, even as they proved increasingly costly and ineffective. Instead the evidence much more closely aligns with the theoretical expectations of bureaucratic policy analysis (BPA), which finds that policy outcomes are more likely to be influenced by political bargaining and organizational inputs as by top-down cost-benefit analyses or other more strategic calculations. The BPA bargaining lens is even more broadly applicable when expanded to include the much wider range of transnational and non-US government players that tend to be involved in these sorts of hybrid political and security environments. Page 99 fits into this by exploring the nature of the bargaining arena, and how this helps explain why so many more checks were imposed on Afghan local forces (the Afghan Local Police) than on the Iraqi forces mobilized only a few years earlier (the sahwa). It’s an important piece of the puzzle but likely not enough of one for the reader to get a sense of the full book on its own.

Learn more about Illusions of Control at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cormac Ó Gráda's "The Hidden Victims"

Cormac Ó Gráda is an Irish economic historian and professor emeritus at University College Dublin. His many books include Famine: A Short History and Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains part of an account of famine in Moldova, then part of the former Soviet Union, in the wake of World War 2. The first part of the page is a table describing the death rate. The second part contains:

As with all Soviet famines, the underlying causes of the (Moldovan) famine have been disputed. Severe drought in the spring of 1946 in the wake of an occupation that left the economy flattened and twenty million dead is one possibility; official culpability for prioritizing grain exports at the expense of the starving masses is another. In 1946, for the fifth year in a row, grain output in the Soviet Union was less than half its pre-war average. Wiliam P. Forrest believed that in Ukraine it had taken a herculean effort to plant “over 80 percent” of the 1940 harvested area but that the crop yield per acre could not, “at the most optimistic estimate”, have been much more than 40 percent of that of 1940.

If browsers open the book to page 99, would they get a good or a poor idea of the whole work? Yes and No. Page 99 is representative of one important part of a 500-page book, which describes the impact of WW1 and WW2 on civilians in the form of hunger, starvation, and related diseases. It captures the ‘feel’ of the book’s account of the many war-famines that together killed over twenty million civilians. It also reflects the fact that, as the title indicates, civilian deaths are the subject of the book. Page 99 also captures the way the book is written: a mélange of quantification, analysis, and narrative. Famine deaths in the Soviet Union in 1946-7 represented only a small fraction of the sixty million or so deaths of non- combatants during the two wars.

Page 99 also hints at the grim reality that the civilian death toll from both wars continued to mount after 1918 and 1945, respectively. However, it does not capture the fact that the book is about all kinds of civilian casualties. The Hidden Victims also describes and seeks to count civilian casualties by genocide, aerial bombing, and by other means, as well as to document the cost to survivors in terms of forced displacement, trauma, and sexual violence. It also highlights where the likely true figures differ from those most frequently cited, and where the truth will always be difficult to establish. Nor does page 99 contain any of the dozens of black-and-white photographic images employed

Learn more about The Hidden Victims at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosanne Liebermann's "Exile, Incorporated"

Rosanne Liebermann is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Aarhus University in Denmark. She holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Theology from the University of Oxford.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Exile, Incorporated: The Body in the Book of Ezekiel, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Exile, Incorporated occurs in the middle of Chapter 4 and begins a new section entitled “The Unfaithful Wife, the Unnatural Mother.” The section begins: “While the woman in Ezekiel 16 is made to look the part of Yhwh’s wife, her behaviour once married is not fitting for her new social role. The text begins to list Yhwh’s accusations against her.” There follows a quote from Ezekiel 16:15-19 in my translation. This part of the Old Testament text shows that the woman, who has married the god Yhwh in Ezekiel’s metaphorical story, immediately begins to behave promiscuously. She uses the clothes, jewellery, perfume, and food Yhwh gave her as wedding gifts to make, adorn, and offer to statues of other gods. The text goes on to accuse her of promiscuity with Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and other foreigners (Ezek 16:25-26, 28-29). Yhwh condemns the woman’s behaviour by saying that she is more sinful than a sex worker. Whereas a sex worker’s activities can be explained by her need for money, Yhwh’s wife pays other men to persuade them to sleep with her.

This page of Exile, Incorporated does not provide an especially good insight into my book. Page 99 is mostly taken up by primary text, the relevance of which for the book’s argument is only unpacked in the following pages. I could imagine that anyone beginning to read the book at this page would find it inaccessible and put it back down again!

However, the initial sentence of page 99 does reflect one of the book’s core premises: that identity is something constantly created and maintained via the practices and experiences of the body. Being ascribed a certain identity, whether at birth or later on, is not enough to maintain that identity unquestionably throughout life. In the case of the metaphor in Ezekiel 16 featured on page 99, a woman becomes a high-status wife through her marriage to a deity, but she loses that status via her sexual promiscuity. My book goes on to discuss how the woman also fails to act as any normal kind of mother, since she slaughters her own children. In Ezekiel’s metaphor, the woman represents Jerusalem, and her promiscuity and child sacrifice represent the people’s worship of gods other than Yhwh and forming of alliances with foreign nations. Ezekiel seeks to demonstrate that, just as a woman loses her identity as a wife because of her unfaithfulness, Jerusalem loses its identity as Yhwh’s special city due to its disloyalty.

This is all part of the main argument of Exile, Incorporated: that the book of Ezekiel seeks to portray the Judeans who went into exile to Babylonia in the sixth century BCE as the continuation of Yhwh’s people. By undermining Jerusalem and the Judeans who remained there, Ezekiel can demonstrate that it is the Judeans in Babylonia who are the true people of Yhwh. But these exiled Judeans cannot rely on their special group identity, either. According to the book of Ezekiel, they must continually enact this identity via their bodies; for example, by conducting circumcision, observing Sabbaths and feast days, and leaving ritual activities up to the priesthood. Ezekiel’s metaphor about the unfaithful wife also acts as a cautionary tale regarding sexual liaisons with foreigners. In these ways, I argue that the book of Ezekiel advocates that the Judeans in Babylonia “incorporate” their specifically exilic Judean identity into their everyday behaviours and experiences.

Learn more about Exile, Incorporated at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott K. Taylor's "Ambivalent Pleasures"

Scott K. Taylor is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain.

Taylor applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ambivalent Conquests does a good job of portraying how this book tries to uncover the deep patterns in the past that set the stage for drug use today. In particular, it shows early modern Europeans wrestling with the soft drugs that were either new to them at the time or newly available in mass quantities – sugar, chocolate, coffee, tea, distilled spirits like rum and gin, opium, and on this page, tobacco. Here readers will find Europeans trying to figure out why tobacco, like all the other new drugs, were so hard to quit using once started. Early modern Europeans thought they understood the medicinal properties of all these substances quite well – and all these drugs were used initially as medicines – through the old concepts of Galenic humoral medicine that dated back to ancient Greece. But nothing in their medical heritage helped them understand what we today would call “addiction” or “substance use disorder.” On this page, we find observers from England, France, and Spain wondering if something in the drugs themselves gave them power over their users, and they employed the language of sorcery and slavery to articulate this idea. Other attempts to understand addiction drew on their understanding of gluttony, an individual vice, or on problems that inhered in society as a whole, like luxury and debauchery. Probing the ways that Europeans first tried to grapple with the compulsive use of psychotropic drugs might help us see a way forward when the “brain disease” model of substance abuse is beginning to crumble today.

Learn more about Ambivalent Pleasures at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances Yaping Wang's "The Art of State Persuasion"

Frances Yaping Wang is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. She received her PhD in politics from the University of Virginia. She was previously an assistant professor at the Singapore Management University, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame's International Security Center, a Minerva-United State Institute of Peace (USIP) Peace Scholar, a predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies of the George Washington University, and an editor/analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Wang applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Art of State Persuasion: China's Strategic Use of Media in Interstate Disputes, and reported the following:

Page 99 delves into China’s hardline foreign policy through a detailed case study of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war. Drawing on archival sources and historical data, it provides a concise overview of China’s internal decision-making process leading up to the conflict.

While this page offers a rich, granular analysis of a significant historical event, it is perhaps too specific to serve as an introduction to the broader themes of the book. In fact, any page from the introduction would better capture the book’s overarching ideas than page 99. Page 99 is just one part of a larger theoretical framework, which is illustrated through four distinct case studies. These case studies, each representing different scenarios, are integral to the book’s argument. The 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war is the only historical case among them, distinguished by its rich historical context and its exploration of one of the most extensive propaganda campaigns in Chinese history—a campaign that spanned a decade and remains one of the most remarkable feats of the Chinese propaganda machinery.

While page 99 effectively showcases the meticulous use of evidence, including quotes from recently declassified documents, it is but a small window into the book’s broader narrative. Beyond this historical case, the book also employs advanced computerized text analysis to compare various types of propaganda campaigns, drawing insightful comparisons between Chinese propaganda and that of other authoritarian regimes. In sum, while page 99 provides a fascinating and detailed glimpse into a crucial historical case, capturing the depth of analysis and the rigorous use of evidence, it offers only a narrow perspective on the book’s wider argument. For those looking to grasp the full scope and intent of the book, the introduction would provide a far better entry point.

Visit Frances Yaping Wang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Casey Michel's "Foreign Agents"

Casey Michel is the Director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, as well as a writer, analyst, and investigative journalist working on topics ranging from kleptocracy, illicit finance, dark money, foreign lobbying, and foreign interference to the legacies of Russian and Soviet colonialism.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, and reported the following:

The premise of page 99 is simple: Moscow has, for decades, attempted to interfere in the highest ranks of American politics, and attempted to aid specific American presidential candidates wherever and however it can. From Josef Stalin's efforts to launch Henry Wallace to the presidency in 1948 to Moscow's efforts to support Adlai Stevenson in 1960 and beyond, the Kremlin's efforts to steer American politics long predates its interference and influence operations in 2016. But there is one clear difference: before 2016, every major American candidate the Kremlin attempted to cultivate previously had turned them down. And then Donald Trump came along, and opened the doors to as much Kremlin aid as he could.

And that, in a sense, summarizes what much of Foreign Agents is about: foreign regimes have tried for decades—in some cases centuries—to access leading American politicians, and to lobby and influence them for specific policy outcomes. In the process, they've built the foreign lobbying industry into the multi-billion-dollar behemoth it now is. But it is only in recent years—and thanks especially to America's most prominent politicians, such as Trump—that these regimes have achieved a level of success they've only dreamed of, injecting themselves directly into the White House in ways we're only just now learning about.

All of this is why I wrote Foreign Agents: to reveal what the foreign lobbying industry once was, and what it's since become, and how it's become so wildly, devastatingly successful. Because it's no longer just traditional lobbyists themselves who are helping these regimes. It's now PR agents and law firms, consultancies and former congressional officials, even think tanks and universities who've transformed into vehicles of influence for foreign regimes. In the process, they've opened untold doors to the most kleptocratic regimes on the planet—all of whom are bent on tilting American policy, remaining in power, and pillaging their populations as long as they possibly can.

It's not a new effort, as page 99 of Foreign Agents makes clear. But it's one that's found unmitigated success—and one that would make figures like Stalin green with envy.

Visit Casey Michel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Edward Green's "Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God"

Jeffrey Edward Green is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Shadow of Unfairness and The Eyes of the People.

Green applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, and reported the following:

From page 99 [footnotes omitted]:

…Whitman answers the child by treating the grass as the “flag of my disposition,” a mirror of Whitman’s own selfhood and, in keeping with the Emersonian tradition, what is reflected in this mirror is imbued with a quasi-divinity, pointing to the elevation and ennoblement of the self: “hopeful green stuff,” “the hand- kerchief of the lord,” “a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,” a “produced babe,” “a uniform hieroglyphic.” Even the darkest rendering is still affirmative: “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” In Dylan’s poem, a child, in contemplating the grass and through the grass himself, savagely rips grass out of the ground, remorsefully acknowledges yet also interrogates his guilt (asking “How can this bother me?”), and then likens himself to “a frightened fox” and “a demon child.” This is but one example of how Dylan departs from Emerson and Thoreau, the latter of whom, for instance, concludes and counterbalances his grim castigation of his fellow citizens for their insufficient outrage against slavery in “Slavery in Massachusetts” by finding promise of redemption in a white water lily: “What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower!”

While Dylan does think that local improvements in specific social contexts can be made—at least his own episodic political efforts imply as much—he rejects providentialism, contemplating that the arc of the moral universe either does not exist or bends toward permanent injustice. Even if Dylan is less forthcoming than Emerson and Thoreau in expounding this competing, more pessimistic vision, his reticence in this respect itself has theoretical implications insofar as it leads him to refrain from the metaphysical excesses of Emerson and Thoreau when they imagine a divine spark existing within each human being, when they find moral reassurance in natural beauty, and when they postulate a divine energy working for the ultimate good of the world. Dylan’s conception of self-reliance, and of the problem of a self-reliant individual turning away from the fight against injustice, is simply not buttressed by these speculative, self-congratulating logics. The question at stake is not simply whether, in the abstract, people should be optimistic or pessimistic about the direction of the world, but for whom such dispositions are relatively more appropriate. Hope…

In this case, the Page 99 Test would be partially vindicated. Page 99 has a lot to say about a significant element of Part I one of my book—the part in which I argue that Dylan is almost unique in the history of political thought in publicly disclaiming his willingness to commit himself to a social justice cause he has helped to lead (the civil rights movement) because he has come to believe that the commitment to social justice conflicts with his commitment to being a self-reliant, free individual. The only other thinkers I know of who do something roughly similar are Emerson and Thoreau. Yet as much as Dylan belongs in their tradition, he is also importantly distinct. He is less self-satisfied in his self-reliance than are Emerson and Thoreau. There are numerous features of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s self-satisfaction, and of Dylan’s contrasting lack of self-satisfaction. One key issue—the issue discussed on page 99—has to do with providentialism. Emerson and Thoreau would have agreed with what Theodore Parker and later Martin Luther King Jr. said: “that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.” Dylan, however, disagrees. When he practices self-reliance, he does so with the expectation that there is no arc to moral universe, or that it tends toward injustice. Part of their disagreement concerns nature. Whereas Emerson and Thoreau—and poets inspired by them such as Whitman—could find evidence of providentialism in nature, Dylan, in such works as his “Poem to Joanie,” refuses to find in nature a source of moral comfort. Dylan perhaps agrees with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman that nature is a mirror of humanity, but what this mirror reflects is something far from comforting. If anything, when Dylan treats nature as a mirror, what it reflects back is the human being as a dangerous and unreliable being.

But there are more reasons Dylan rejects providentialism than what is discussed on page 99. There are also more bases on which to compare and contrast Dylan to the nineteenth century tradition of self-reliance besides providentialism. Further, there are more features of my argument that Dylan—almost unique within the history of political thought—testifies to the collision between freedom and justice besides his relationship to the nineteenth century tradition of self-reliance. And, in the broadest sense of the message of my book, my book is concerned with tracing three sets of conflicts Dylan testifies to (and the ethical implications that follow from these conflicts): not just the conflict between freedom and justice, but also the conflict between freedom and God as well as between God and justice. Put differently, the book is not just concerned with Dylan’s remarkable withdrawal from the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but—among other topics—his conversion to evangelical Christianity in the late 1970s and its aftermath as well as his longstanding pessimism about politics and the possibility of achieving peace and justice in the world. So page 99 gives a part of a part of a part of a part—I hope an interesting and illuminating part, but still a fragment.

Learn more about Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Eyes of the People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniela R. P. Weiner's "Teaching a Dark Chapter"

Daniela Weiner is a Lecturer in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education at Stanford University. She has published in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, and Journal of Contemporary History.

Weiner applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book discusses some tactics that East German school history textbooks in the early 1960s used to deflect complicity and how those tactics mirrored or diverged from those employed by West German schoolbooks.

Page 99 is an important part of my analysis. It points to one of the main thrusts of my book’s argument— that I isolate the early 1960s as a critical moment in the development of educational narratives about the Nazi/Fascist past and the Holocaust. However, if a reader were to open to the book to page 99 and read only it, the reader might come away with the erroneous impression that my book is first and foremost about East German textbooks (perhaps in relation to West German textbooks). Page 99 fails to reflect the transnational comparison between Italy, East Germany, and West German textbooks that is at the heart of my study and that differentiates my book from much previous historical work.

Indeed, the inclusion of Italy is fundamental to my book’s premise. As I explain in the introduction to my book, while there are some other comparative studies that address East German and West German methods of coming to terms with the past using educational materials, Italy is usually left out of this analysis. But including Italy is quite important; Italy serves as an essential comparative partner to the Germanys when understanding the post-fascist educational experience. Italy had a history of fascism a decade before Hitler ever came to governmental power in Germany. Furthermore, Allied occupying forces saw the textbook revision process in Italy (deFascistization) and in Germany (deNazification) as closely interconnected. So, it’s a shame that a browser’s test that opened to only page 99 would fail to include Italy.

Learn more about Teaching a Dark Chapter at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Forth's "Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement"

Aidan Forth is an associate professor of British, imperial, and global history at MacEwan University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement, and reported the following:

Camps: A Global History examines mass confinement across a broad historical canvas. Early chapters explore workhouses, labor colonies, slave plantations, and the many camps of the colonial world. Later chapters turn to Guantanamo Bay, the mass internment of China’s Uyghurs, and the detention of Palestinian refugees. A central challenge—and central payoff—of a book of this nature is to recognize diversity while highlighting patterns and practices that have recurred across multiple historical contexts. Page 99, near the beginning of chapter 4, sees this process in action. The focus is an infamous site of mass confinement: the Soviet gulag. As a short, synthetic work, Camps cannot possibly offer a thorough or definitive history of this richly studied topic. Instead, the goal is to draw connections and comparisons with other times and places—and in the process, to shed new light on a familiar subject.

Following a brief consideration of the gulag’s pre-history, including penal exile in Tsarist Siberia and Civil War counterinsurgencies against guerrilla rebels, page 99 examines Soviet collectivization in the 1930s. Rarely discussed in scholarship framed by national rather than global history, military and colonial dynamics were crucial to the gulag’s development. Class warfare was more than metaphorical, page 99 argues, as Bolsheviks approached the Soviet countryside like “a foreign country to be invaded, occupied, and conquered.” As Jozef Stalin noted, western countries had funded industrialization through the “‘merciless exploitation’ of colonial peoples.” Yet, with “no (overseas) colonies ‘to plunder’,” the Soviet Union “squeezed its own peasantry”—conceived with dehumanizing, often colonial tropes—in a campaign more violent “than nineteenth-century enclosure or the concomitant consolidation of colonial holdings.” Such practices generated resistance from Ukrainian partisans, Islamic Basmachi militants, and land-holding kulaks, who were incarcerated, en masse, as “an act of virtual war.” In this way, at least, the gulag resembled “the colonial camps of Cuba and South Africa (chapter 3)…[and] the ‘strategic hamlets’ and ‘new villages’…[of] Malaya and Vietnam (chapter 7).” And yet, the chapter cautions, the gulag increasingly functioned in a “world of…paranoid conspiracies rather than real insurgencies.” As such, a revolutionary “plot mentality,” inherited from the French Revolution, along with tactics of authoritarian rule shared with Nazi Germany and Communist China, complemented structures of colonial and military occupation in the Soviet countryside.

Learn more about Camps at the University of Toronto Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Barbed-Wire Imperialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. L. Schellenberg's "What God Would Have Known"

J. L. Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of ten books and 70 published articles. His first book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, introduced a new argument against theism that remains the subject of much discussion. Also influential is a trilogy from Cornell and several subsequent volumes on a sceptical form of religion compatible with the denial of theism. These latter ideas are placed into an evolutionary context and made generally accessible in a short work from Oxford called Evolutionary Religion.

Schellenberg applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book gives part of my argument for supposing that what I call “the Big Narrative” – the story embedded in the Bible of God’s dealings with human beings across many centuries – is false. Here is close to 99% of what appears on that page:

Why should we not endorse [the Big Narrative]? Suppose we ignore the somewhat unsavoury part about God’s jealousness with regard to worship, focusing on social injustice when considering what according to the story has gone wrong, and set aside the fact that doing good for its own sake rather than for reward or to avoid punishment appears to be insufficiently emphasized. Even so, two major points cry out for attention.

First, notice how instead of social and psychological complexity, the gift of biological and cultural evolution subtly intertwined, we have an oversimple portrayal of ‘good guys and bad guys.’ On one side are the righteous, on the other the wicked, easily identified and distinguished, with the wicked quite able to be righteous instead if only they tried or, if regarded as incorrigible, entirely to blame for being in this condition. An analogy comes from the movies: think of 1950s Westerns. Even if today’s movies involving crime and bad behaviour are themselves criticizable in many ways, they do convey the complexity of human motives and social interactions more faithfully than did most of those Westerns. Likewise, what we have learned from various religious and philosophical traditions and from science about the subtleties of human nature and its relation to other wider facts has shown the shortcomings of the repeated raw contrasts in the Big Narrative between good and evil. There is no room here for sincerely held alternative religious beliefs or the cultural factors that might have produced them, for mixed motives, for the influence on behaviour of unconscious factors or of abuse in childhood, for addiction, for poor mental health and disorders such as sociopathy, for systemic factors traceable to the advent of agriculture and stratified societies, or, in the background, for biological evolution.

Second, there is the mistaken assumption, on the part of anyone who acquiesces in the Big Narrative, that even their creator, who knows all the relevant causal factors and lovingly numbers all the hairs on their heads, will justly respond to the bad behaviour of the ‘wicked’ with violent punishment and, in the end, complete destruction. God, in other words, is seen as exhibiting and sanctioning behaviour we have learned signals emotional or moral immaturity as well as a poor success rate when it comes to improving behaviour and contributing to long-term human flourishing (here it is worth contemplating why we see less today in the way of corporal punishment and more in the way of prison reform). Would an unsurpassably great personal being suffer from such immaturity?

So would someone who turns to page 99 in my book, reading what you’ve just read, get a good idea of what the whole work is about? Well, it would be nice to be able to ask you what you think it’s about after reading this excerpt. Since I can’t do that, let me guess – and I’ll include the assumption that you know and have thought about the work’s title and subtitle and have figured out that “the Big Narrative” refers to biblical content. Putting 2 and 2 together, I imagine you may hit on the thought that, given what goes into the concept of God, including omniscience, any God there may be would have to have known way back then, when the Big Narrative was formed, all manner of things that intellectual and moral development have made clear to us only much more recently. Probably you’ll also pick up on the fact that I think this is some kind of problem for the Big Narrative, and by extension for the religious views that require it to be true.

If you got this much from the Page 99 Test, you would grasp a central idea of the book, but you would still be mostly in the dark about how I develop and apply it in the book. You would see that, unlike many other critics of classical Christian doctrine, I take human cultural progress to reveal how much God (if there were a God) would have known way back when rather than revealing an ignorant and obtuse deity – a quite contemptible figure, in the view of Richard Dawkins. The key is not to let what the biblical writers say about God determine what goes into our idea of God. If God is by definition omniscient then God would have to know everything we know! But the Page 99 Test will leave you wondering why I think this matters, in relation to the truth of Christian doctrine. It won’t even tell you which Christian doctrine is at stake in the chapter to which page 99 belongs.

So let me tell you. It’s the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus. This doctrine, as I argue in Chapter 5, is in effect an extension of the Big Narrative. And the main idea of the chapter (very roughly) is that the followers of Jesus could have been correct in elevating him to divinity and placing him into the Big Narrative in the way they did only if they were following in thought what God had already done; only if God too were operating within the thought world of the Big Narrative. But if the Big Narrative is false, a picture not just peripherally but in its central features unworthy of God, then we must say that God – any real God there may be – would not be associated with the Big Narrative in this way. By identifying with Jesus in the manner required by the divinity doctrine, which according to Christians involved raising Jesus from the dead, God would indeed be confirming something, as has often been said. But this thought should be worrisome instead of deemed helpful, because what God would be confirming is a picture that centrally features an oversimplified understanding of human psychology, an inappropriate response to wrongdoing, and the condoning of violence – a false picture.

That’s a summary of what I call the Big Narrative Argument, which is then developed in Chapter 5 in four more specific ways which – so I argue – show how human intellectual and moral development can be used to undermine the doctrine of a divine Jesus. The other chapters of the book address other doctrines, also on the basis of “what God would have known,” until, by the end, we have twenty new arguments against Christianity’s central classical claims about reality. Only one has to be right for Christian doctrine to be false. If you read the book, let me know which argument you think has the best chance of being right!

Visit J. L. Schellenberg's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Will to Imagine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Bartlett's "History in Flames"

Robert Bartlett is Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews. His books include The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350, which won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History. He has written and presented three television series for the BBC, Inside the Medieval Mind (2008), The Normans (2010), and The Plantagenets (2014).

Bartlett applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts, and reported the following:

Page 99 of History in Flames is deep in the build-up to the Irish civil war of 1922, when those fighting for Irish independence had to decide whether to accept a half-way house or not. The half-way house on offer was (1) a partitioned Ireland and (2) a "Free State" that recognized the British monarch as its head of state. The two sides on this issue began fighting and one consequence was the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland and the incineration of 800 years of Irish historical records.

This is what the book is about - the loss of written records of the medieval past, not though flood, mice or accidental fires, but though human violence. It begins with discussion of how a manuscript culture works - everything is hand written and hence precarious, and we wonder how can we know what has been lost, what can be saved.

Theere are five case studies, from Strasbourg in 1870 to Chartres in 1944. And a conclusion "we make the past but can also lose it".

Learn more about History in Flames at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages.

The Page 99 Test: Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Freeman's "Ruin Their Crops on the Ground"

Andrea Freeman, a pioneer in the field of food politics, is a professor at Southwestern Law School. A Fulbright scholar and author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, Freeman has published and appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, The Takeaway, Here & Now, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Black Agenda Report, and more. She lives in Los Angeles.

Freeman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ruin Their Crops on the Ground comes near the beginning of the chapter titled The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk. It describes the government’s struggle to store the big orange blocks of American cheese that the USDA had to buy because of subsidies in the Farm Bill that support dairy farmers. The USDA filled all the cold storages in the U.S. with cheese then rented a half-acre cave in Kansas and piled cheese blocks from floor to ceiling. But it still had too much cheese on its hands. The agency created a public-school milk program to try to get rid of some of the unwanted beverage. As the school milk program grew over the decades, public school students became less and less white.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book. This page introduces the reader to different ways the government has approached the challenge of supporting an industry whose product is undesirable to most of the population because they experience lactose intolerance or other harmful effects of consuming milk. The last sentence foreshadows the link between dairy policy and racism.

If page 99 piques the reader’s interest, they can continue reading the chapter to discover the different ways that milk and white supremacy have interacted over time. They will meet USDA milk marketing superstar White Gold, a fabulous rock opera star who reminds his Black back-up singers The Calcium Twins how he told them that milk would make their time of the month – a ride down the red river – easier for them and him. They will learn that public school students who want an alternative to cow’s milk have to go to a doctor for a diagnosis that they have a disability. This rule helps dispose of a subsidized commodity by giving it to people who get sick from it - just to boost corporate profits.

Learn more about Ruin Their Crops on the Ground at the Metropolitan Books website.

The Page 99 Test: Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice.

--Marshal Zeringue

William A. Everett's "The Year that Made the Musical"

William A. Everett is Curators' Distinguished Professor of Musicology Emeritus at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is contributing co-editor to The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (with Paul R. Laird, 3rd edition, 2017) and currently edits the series Cambridge Elements in Musical Theatre.

Everett applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre, and reported the following:

Page 99 forms part of the discussion on the musical comedy Sitting Pretty, which in 1924 reunited the writing team of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse, who had achieved tremendous fame during the previous decade with their series of so-called “Princess Theatre Musicals.” Sitting Pretty exemplifies one of the book’s main through-lines: creators and stars of the past were returning to Broadway and West End musical stages, as well as those in continental Europe, in an effort to rekindle their earlier successes.

In addition to such re-appearances from past celebrities (and continuations of long, unbroken careers of others), a new generation of creators and performers were cementing their collective and individual star status in 1924, such as the siblings George and Ira Gershwin (1924’s Lady, Be Good! was the first show for which the brothers wrote the complete score). In addition to this dovetailing of the remembered and the yet-to-be-remembered, musical theatre in 1924 was very much a transnational enterprise. Different English-language versions of the Berlin blockbuster Madame Pompadour were playing in London (huge hit) and New York (massive flop) that year, in addition to an Italian-language version that opened in Milan. Zarzuelas that opened in Madrid transferred to Buenos Aires, and an English-language revision of a well-known zarzuela opened in London as The First Kiss. New management at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna ushered in Emmerich Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza (Countess Maritza), with productions taking place later that year in Berlin, Warsaw, Venice, Budapest, and elsewhere. Confluences of the past and the present were thus coupled with all sorts of geographical mobilities, not to mention the continued permeability and osmosis between genres such as operetta, revue, and musical comedy. The overall result was a highly variated tapestry held together through an innate sense of glamour. Page 99 of The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre, which explores Sitting Pretty, provides a closer look at one of these threads.

Learn more about The Year that Made the Musical at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Tibble's "Crusader Criminals"

Steve Tibble is a graduate of Cambridge and London Universities, and is a research associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is one of the foremost academics currently working in the field of the crusades, and is the author of the warfare and strategy chapters in both The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades and The Cambridge History of the Crusades (2023).

Tibble's publications have been critically acclaimed and include The Crusader Armies (2018) and The Crusader Strategy (2020), short-listed for the Duke of Wellington's Military History Prize), and Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain (2023).

Tibble applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a microcosm of the central thesis of Crusader Criminals - the idea that the medieval Middle East became a 200-year long demographic vortex, pulling in 'the usual suspects' from across most of the known world, into a dystopian blood-fest that was as much about criminality as it was about warfare. It looks at the example of the Turkic entrants into the arena, but the book as a whole looks at all the cultures, ethnicities and religions involved. Here goes with a cut down version of the page:

Crusaders visiting the area might have been unruly; but the situation was, if anything, even worse with the Turks called in to help their Muslim neighbours. At best, these were men to be tolerated and treated with suspicion, rather than wholeheartedly welcomed. At worst, the local Arab population saw them as little better than the enemies they were brought in to fight...

Steppe mercenaries were, in many ways, a general’s dream. Granted, discipline might be a problem; but these were hard men and, with the right leadership, they could be almost seamlessly turned into a voracious and formidable military machine... What the vast majority had in common, however, was that they, like so many of the soldiers fighting in the period of the crusades, were young foreigners. Even when fully employed, they were hard to handle. But they were always borderline criminals – men who were armed, drifting and looking for any opportunity they could grasp.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the real problem of the crusades was not religion.

It was young men. Dislocated. Disinhibited. And in disturbingly large numbers. They were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality. The reason they caused such problems was not that they might be over-entitled, over-sexed or over-opinionated about religion – though they were often all of those things. The ultimate cause, and the ultimate reason why these men were the driver of the chaos that engulfed the medieval Middle East, was far more basic – and it was demographic and anthropological, rather than theological.

Criminality was rife in the medieval crusader states and their neighbours. It was fundamentally driven by two interconnected factors. One was the over-abundance of young (and often armed) men in the population. The other was the way in which these men were so strangely disengaged from the societies in which they found themselves.

But why was that? Why was there such a disproportionate level of testosterone in the air? After all, most medieval societies were at war for long periods of time – but very few experienced the levels of violence and criminality seen in the Middle East of the crusades. And why were these men so problematic? Unruly and underemployed soldiers were always disruptive, but rarely on such a scale. Clearly, something was very different. And for this difference to be sustained for two centuries, the reason had to be systemic, rather than anything more coincidental.

Above all, why were there so many young and dislocated men in the region?

The first trigger was climate change. Deteriorating weather conditions impacted upon the nomadic Turkic tribes of the western Eurasian steppes. And that caused the second problem: unco

ntrolled mass migration. The nomadic tribes entered the Middle East in force and all the local sedentary societies did their best to fight back.

An arms race had begun in earnest. In a pre-industrial age, that race inevitably found its pr

imary expression in the acquisition of warm bodies. Everyone made a dash to attract as many potential out-of-region recruits as possible – and that process ground on for two centuries.

As these were truly international wars, they drew in troops from absurd distances – European troops (including crusaders) from as far west as the Atlantic coast of Ireland; soldier-slaves from sub-Saharan Africa; or steppe cavalry from central Asia and the Silk Roads. All were welcome. All were useful. And all were grist to the unremitting mill of blood and violence.

The proportion of young, armed men in the region inevitably shot up – and that was doubly jarring, because the civil population had previously been so largely demilitarised. But these men were not just there in huge numbers: they were generally foreigners, with very different customs, and as such were culturally desensitised. These were men both simultaneously alienated and yet strangely liberated. With this new and unstable population in place, levels of violence soared and remained spectacularly high – even by the standards of a region noted for its enduring lawlessness.

A chaotic and supremely dangerous crime wave was coming into its own.

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The Page 99 Test: Templars.

--Marshal Zeringue