Richard Munson's "Ingenious"

Richard Munson is an author and clean-energy advocate. His books include Tech to Table: 25 Innovators Reimagining Food, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, From Edison to Enron, Cardinals of Capitol Hill, and Cousteau: The Captain and His World.

Munson applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ingenious describes Benjamin Franklin’s efforts after the French and Indian War to advance a union between England and the American colonies. It states:

As the war wound down, Franklin weighed in on the peace negotiations to suggest that England assume control over Canada rather than Guadeloupe, arguing that the British Empire needed to secure North America’s northern and western frontiers. He asserted that settlements in the Mississippi valley and Quebec would offer substantial benefits to the mother country, providing an immense outlet for British industry.

The Page 99 Test doesn’t work that well because by page 99 (of 197) Franklin is still loyal to the British king, even suggesting Americans would not “unite against their own nation [England], which protects and encourages them.” That page also does not address Franklin’s science, which this biography asserts is the throughline that integrated Benjamin’s diverse interests.

I argue that historians have highlighted certain of Franklin’s actions – particularly diplomacy – and ignored others – particularly science. One of the most cited biographies devotes only 30 of its 500 pages to Benjamin’s experiments and observations, and an encyclopedia maintains that “Franklin never thought science was as important as public service.”

I disagree. With all due respect to Franklin’s public service, we wouldn’t be discussing his diplomatic prowess were it not for his fame as a leading scientist, which opened doors for him in France, Britian, and the colonies.

Franklin gave us practical advances – including lightning rods, efficient stoves, and bifocals – as well as innovative research on electricity, heat, chemical bonds, weather patterns, and so much more.

Benjamin also used his science politically. Believing Americans would be recognized by European elites only if they could demonstrate technological and scientific strength, he created a scholarly association dubbed the American Philosophical Society, which was one of the first efforts to have representatives from all the then fiercely independent colonies work together.

Ingenious argues we don’t know Franklin as well as we believe nor as richly as he deserves. It concludes by suggesting Benjamin’s continued relevance:

"As a vocal set of modern-day activists reject science and dismiss fact, Benjamin (one of our nation’s founders) highlights the importance of verifiable analysis. As zealots impose their religious beliefs, he makes the case for tolerance. As censors ban books and limit debate, he defends printers and free speech."

Visit Richard Munson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clare Mulley's "Agent Zo"

Clare Mulley is an award-winning public historian, author and broadcaster, primarily focused on female experience during the Second World War.

Her new book is Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter, the critically-acclaimed biography of Elżbieta Zawacka, the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi German-occupied Poland. Previous titles include the award-winning The Woman Who Saved the Children, on Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children although not fond of individual youngsters; The Spy Who Loved, a biography of the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent in the Second World War and who was acclaimed as Churchill’s ‘favourite spy’, Krystyna Skarbek aka Christine Granville; and The Women Who Flew for Hitler, which tells the story of Nazi Germany’s only two female test pilots, one of whom tried to save Hitler’s life while the other tried to kill him. Mulley’s books are widely translated, and have all been optioned for film or TV.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Agent Zo and reported the following:

From page 99:

Zo was in full self-preservation mode. Striding into an upstairs dining-room, when she saw no exit she took a napkin from a table, draped it over her arm, and headed back to the staircase. Before she could climb any further, someone pulled her roughly to one side. Gesturing her to be silent, Paco steered Zo into a backroom. It struck her that she had no idea whether he was playing both sides, or if the guards had simply come to the inn for a glass of beer and been lucky. Before she had gathered her thoughts, Paco shoved her out of a side door directly down onto the mountainside…

'Agent Zo', in fact Elżbieta Zawacka, was very much the courageous woman of action during the Second World War, so it seems fitting to stumble across her evading Nazi German arrest, on page 99 of the book, through a mixture of cool presence of mind and being thrown from an upstairs door! This was in the spring of 1943, when she had already served behind enemy lines for over three years, as an intelligence officer and courier for the Polish resistance ‘Home Army’. Having already had a particularly close escape, forcing her to leap from a fast-moving steam-train, Zo had now been appointed as the only female emissary of the commander of an Allied army, and sent with microfilm across almost 1,000 miles of occupied Europe, to Britain.

Despite this close shave, as well as almost drowning in the water tender of another train, and being shot at in the freezing mountain passes of the Pyrenees, Zo completed her mission. That September she became the only woman to parachute from Britain to enemy-occupied Poland, where she took part in the largest organised act of defiance against Nazi German-occupation: the Warsaw Uprising. The great irony of her dramatic true story is that she was a hair’s breadth from capture from the very first day of the war to the last, but she was only ever arrested by the Soviet-imposed communist regime in her own country, Poland, after the war. To say more would be to give too much away…!

Visit Clare Mulley's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Women Who Flew For Hitler.

The Page 99 Test: The Women Who Flew For Hitler.

My Book, The Movie: Agent Zo.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Furley's "Myths, Muses and Mortals"

William Furley is emeritus professor of Greek at Heidelberg University and research fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, London. His publications include Greek Hymns and three editions of plays by Menander: Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, and Misoumenos.

Furley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Myths, Muses and Mortals: The Way of Life in Ancient Greece, and reported the following:

Page ninety-nine of my book comes from a chapter on travel and exploration in ancient Greece. It illustrates the Greeks' spirit of enterprise and discovery by a work of fantasy, the True History, by the second-century (AD) satirical writer Lucian. He describes an adventurer's fantastic voyage into the unknown starting from the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) and exploring space, the heavenly bodies and far-flung lands. Here is an excerpt:

Although Lucian emphasizes that nothing he will relate of his fantasy journey is true, he says that makes him more honest than many other `historians' in that respect: `In one respect I am telling the truth---when I admit I'm lying.' (4) Lucian's narrator tells how he made preparations for a journey starting at the Pillars of Herakles. This landmark, the Straits of Gibraltar, was, for the Greeks, already the end of the known world. Their ships plied the Mediterranean, even if they knew that Phoenicians had gone further, even, by then, circumnavigating the continent of Africa, as they claimed (see Herodotus 4.42). So when Lucian's narrator says that he set off from Gibraltar to discover the `end of the world', this project was equivalent to that of Columbus in 1492: it was a voyage into the unknown. Although invented, the spirit in which he undertook the adventure is typical of the real-life spirit of Greek exploration by sea.

Page ninety-nine of my book is, as it happens, a useful sample of the whole. It illustrates my method throughout which is to introduce the Greek world through illustrative passages of literature and documentary evidence, place them in their historical context, and interpret the events and sentiments they are transmitting. The passage also reflects the intention of my book which is to explore the fascination of the ancient Greek world in an adventurous spirit, although my account is firmly grounded in the real written and visual record left by the Greeks.

The chapter on travel/exploration is one of nine focusing on various aspects of the 'Greek experience', ranging from love and celebration to warfare and philosophical thought. Central is a long section on Daily Life which, very roughly, follows important moments in the ancient Greek's day, from shopping in the morning at the Agora, messaging each other with writing tablets, to dinner-time entertainment and night-time street crime. As sources for these forays into ancient mentality I use works of literature from Homer at the beginning to the late Greek romantic novels, from historical works to courtroom speeches, from private curse tablets to public inscriptions. Most of our evidence comes from ancient Athens, but my scope covers writers and individuals from all over Greece and spans nearly a millennium. The emphasis throughout is not on history, although the story hangs on an historical frame, but on the Greeks' own expression of their feelings and experiences as they navigated these aspects of life. The text is illustrated by over fifty images, a good many of them taken by myself over the years.

Visit William Furley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue