He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline, and reported the following:
Page 99 gives an overall view of how well one of the rival hypothesis to the major argument of the book performs at explaining the British decision to reconquer the Falklands islands invaded in 1982 by Argentina. As such, page 99 explains that the idea of going to war for natural resources is a myth and can’t explain the war.Learn more about Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War at the McGill-Queens University Press website.
Therefore, the test of page 99 simply does not work at all for my book If a reader opens the book at page 99, he or she won’t just have a very succinct idea of a rival argument tested, but he or she won’t be reading about the main argument developed in the book and tested throughout several case studies.
What page 99 reveals is still interesting to read precisely because it disproves one of the arguments argued in the existing literature. To be more precise, economic considerations (getting access to natural resources) are mentioned in declassified governmental archives, but the argument is used to justify why the Falklands should be handed over to Argentina and not defended. Indirectly page 99 shows the relevance of the book: providing a new way of understanding decision-making processes and the need to use new explanatory and theoretical frameworks to better understand past events and more importantly events that are occurring today in a changing world. Giving new ways of understanding what happens in the world is what my book tries to do by offering a new framework called “nostalgic virility” and that articulates understanding of states status with leaders interpretation of history and of what being virile means.
--Marshal Zeringue
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