American Historians for the best book on American history published in a language other than English. She regularly appears on radio, podcasts, and TV shows to speak about her research in English and French.
Devienne applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, and reported the following:
How do you feel about a highway being built on your favorite beach? Not so great, I imagine. Then I would recommend you flip quickly through page 99 of Sand Rush because you’ll see the image of a highway project planned for Venice Beach in the 1930s. Yes, that’s right. In the 1930s, what I call the “Los Angeles beach lobby”, that is a group of engineers, businessmen and public officials interested in modernizing the city’s shoreline, planned to artificially enlarge Venice Beach and build on it a massive highway. Thankfully, this never came to fruition but it’s a great example of the beach lobby’s goal: developing modern beaches for a middle-class, automobile public.Learn more about Sand Rush at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 falls half-way through chapter 3, where I describe the emergence of this beach lobby. Horrified by what they viewed as eroded, dirty, and crowded shores, this group of mostly white men set on to remake the coastline, which they saw as intimately linked to the city’s fate. Page 99 is not only home to this shocking illustration of their vision for Venice; it goes into their shrewd work getting all coastal property owners on board. Now I should give some credit to the beach lobby. While their plans for beach highways may seem horrifically dated to us, they also pushed for key legislation to plan the coastline at the regional level, taking into account ecological phenomena such as littoral drift. They also campaigned successfully for public beach acquisition, which means we can all access and enjoy most of the county’s shorelines.
The Page 99 Test works well for Sand Rush in the sense that it highlights one of the key primary sources for the book: the archives of the beach lobby who campaigned for the California coastline throughout the 20th century. The California Beaches Association, the lobby’s main organization in the 1930s, published a monthly newsletter which I mined extensively to write the book. Without those, I wouldn’t have been able to understand how LA became the testing ground for these engineers and planners to imagine what a modern beach should look like.
Yet page 99 fails in showcasing the breadth of the book. Sand Rush describes the modernization campaign that transformed LA into one of the world’s greatest coastal metropolises. But it also explores how ordinary Angeleno/as responded to these transformations and the role that Hollywood played in spreading the hallmarks of LA beach culture across the world. The book follows black entrepreneurs, bodybuilders, Hollywood stars, Venice beatniks and beach-crazed teenagers as it charts the making of this most iconic site in international imaginaries.
In other words, if you were to stop at page 99, you’d think the book investigates the beaches from an environmental and urban planning lens. But Sand Rush is, in my view, a lot more! It’s a combination of urban, environmental, social, cultural, policy, and body history. It’s as much about bulldozers transporting sand to eroded beaches as it is about Pamela Anderson reinventing the silent-movie-era bathing beauty phenomenon for the late 20th century. This richness of sources and topics is what I loved about writing Sand Rush and I hope the readers enjoy it too!
--Marshal Zeringue
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