Matt Wilde's "A Blessing and a Curse"

Matt Wilde is an anthropologist and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela, and reported the following:

A Blessing and a Curse is a book about how petro-states shape the everyday lives of their citizens in complex and contradictory ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in urban Venezuela over the course of a decade, it explores how the residents of a low-income periphery known as El Camoruco experienced conflictual social change under the governments of first Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro. One of the book’s central arguments is that the drive to undertake radical social and political reforms using oil revenues produced an array of moral doubts for the residents of El Camruco, as the circulation of petro-dollars in local and everyday settings led to new dilemmas for the pro-government grassroots activists (chavistas) who play a central role in the book’s analysis.

Situated in a chapter titled “The Moral Life of Revolution,” page 99 encapsulates these doubts perfectly. It describes how one of the book’s main protagonists, a local chavista leader known as Rafael, wrestles with the offer of a free Blackberry smartphone from a representative of the local mayor. In 2009, the year in which the encounter took place, Blackberry smartphones had a particular cultural cache in Venezuela. As expensive and highly valued imported commodities, they were associated with the kind of North American-flavoured conspicuous consumption that might be found in the salubrious shopping malls located in the wealthiest zones of cities like Caracas and Valencia. But as a socialist community leader who hailed from the poor barrios of Valencia’s south – communities that are both geographically and symbolically far from such malls – the offer of the Blackberry constituted a moral hazard for Rafael. As he explains on Page 99:

I’d be really embarrassed to walk around with a phone like that, really embarrassed. To walk around with a tremendous telephone like that with the people who are with me – with where I’m from – I couldn’t do it.

Although tempted by the smartphone, Rafael eventually decides not to accept the offer, concluding that he’s better off with the simple cell phone he already used. In doing so, he’s able to “walk the walk” of socialist asceticism without feeling morally compromised. The scene captures precisely the kind of lived uncertainties that shaped the Bolivarian Revolution even in its most optimistic period. It also shows how the Venezuelan people experienced undercurrents of the political and economic tensions that would later spill over into a profound crisis under President Maduro.

Learn more about A Blessing and a Curse at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carlos Alberto Sánchez's "Blooming in the Ruins"

Carlos Alberto Sánchez is Professor of Philosophy at San José State University, where he teaches and publishes on Mexican philosophy and its history. He grew up in Michoacán, Mexico and King City, California. He is the co-founder and executive editor of the Journal of Mexican Philosophy.

Sánchez applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us toward the Good Life, and reported the following:

Page 99 is one of the culminating pages of Chapter 9, “Be Late to Parties,” which discusses the Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla’s views on punctuality. In this page, I summarize a quote from the previous page which, I claim, “could easily describe our current state of robotic hurriedness. It is the need to fulfill this value that we can blame for road rage, work-related injuries, and other time-related stresses.” This value is what Portilla calls “punctual being”— the idea is that we want to be punctual at whatever cost. I continue, “However, arriving on time once or a million times does not make me punctual in the sense that my very being, the way that I exist in the world, is itself punctual. There is more to life than being punctual— or generous, or trustworthy. Besides, tomorrow or the next day I may fail at being punctual, generous, or trustworthy. It is said, for instance, that in eighteenth- century Königsberg, Prussia, townsfolk would set their watches by the impeccable routines of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Year after year he would take his evening walk at the same exact time, so people knew what time it was when he passed by. But was he at one with punctuality? Had he achieved a “punctual being”? A day came in 1804 when he no longer passed by, when he was no longer punctual. Death made this so. Hence, the answer is no, he was not at one with punctuality. Ultimately, Kant was just a person with a good track record of having kept a strict routine. What this means is that a value, like punctuality, or generosity, or politeness, is only a guide for my actions, something that helps me make sense of and act on the world in which I live. Portilla says that one truly becomes punctual, or one completely fulfills the demands of the value of punctuality, only in retrospect. This is when all of my “on times” are collected into a memory of me, and the final verdict by those who knew me becomes ‘He was punctual.’”

Page 99 is a fairly good representation of the book as a whole. The book itself is meant to introduce readers to Mexican philosophy in a way that is neither technical or hard to grasp. And page 99 does this well. Each chapter is written in such a way that the philosophical idea expressed in an illustration (Kant’s punctuality here) that readers may find either amusing or familiar. Here, on this page, I try to mix the philosophical idea of punctuality with comments about how we all want to be on time but ultimately fail; how death is the only “on time” you’ll ever achieve, and so on.

I wouldn’t say that Blooming in the Ruins passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors. While it is a good representation of the tone of the book, the rest of the book contains many more stories and anecdotes that readers will appreciate, find amusing, or instructive. In other words, the book is even less technical than page 99 and much more so than any philosophy book that the reader may run into.

Visit Carlos Alberto Sánchez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eli Revelle Yano Wilson's "Handcrafted Careers"

Eli Revelle Yano Wilson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. His writing and research explores how work, race, and culture intersect in the new economy. He lives and makes a home in both Albuquerque, New Mexico and Ojai, California.

Wilson applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds us smack dab in the middle of a chapter entitled, "Embrace the Shit!". The page begins with a quote from a woman brewer named Jordyn who is talking about submitting one of her male coworkers to a chokehold to "prove that she belongs in this space." Later down the page, we hear from a man named Sonny who works behind the scenes at a brewery repairing draft systems and scheduling deliveries.

Page 99 centers one of the book's main goals: taking readers behind the scenes to illuminate people and their work in the craft beer industry that aren't typically in the spotlight. In an industry dominated by "bearded white guys," we hear about the experiences of white women and people of color who must find their way in brewery workplaces, often not in the sexy "creative-craft" jobs that the public associates with the industry.

Nearly halfway into the book, readers will have zipped past the main argument, which is laid out at the beginning. Class privileged white men enjoy advantages in the craft beer industry that allow them to seamlessly enter this industry and advance into desirable jobs focused on creative production while minority workers get channeled along other less desirable career tracks. I show how bearded white guys leverage not only their material resources and social connections but also land opportunities because their "passion-driven" approach to their career gets idealized by brewery top brass. This becomes a key mechanism of social reproduction within an industry known for trying to do things different from those big bad corporations.

Visit Eli Revelle Yano Wilson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey M. Pilcher's "Hopped Up"

Jeffrey M. Pilcher is Professor of History and Food Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Planet Taco: The Global History of Mexican Food (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (2012), and Food in World History.

Pilcher applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity, and reported the following:

From page 99:

substitution of domestically brewed beers for imported German brands to be a patriotic duty. By contrast, German migrants drove the expansion of the Russian beer industry, replacing the former predominance of English ales and dark native beers with Munich and Pilsner-style lagers. Pasteurized beer shipped from Moscow and St. Petersburg competed for the Siberian trade with German brewers who settled in Irkutsk and Blagoveshchensk. Beer also trickled through the Balkans, courtesy of Hungarian brewers, who learned their trade in Austria, and of Serbians, who exported it to Macedonia and Salonica.

Industrial modernity transformed the beer drinking cultures of Europe and North America, even though marketing was often inspired by rural nostalgia. Despite the efforts of Central European brewers to advertise the high quality of their products, over the long run consumers were generally unwilling to pay more for imported goods when they could buy a similar product brewed locally. In Amsterdam, for example, Bavarian beer had cost four cents more per liter than domestic beers in the 1880s but a decade later the difference had fallen to only one cent. Likewise in the United States, although imported Bohemian beer sold for double the price of local beers about 1880, the premium also declined over time. Brewers and consumers alike thus questioned the meaning and value of genuine beers from cities such as Munich and Pilsen.

A Golden Age?

Parisians flocked to drink a bock with the dapper young Anton Dreher at the Universal Exposition of 1867, but the popularity of his amber Vienna lager was already being challenged by its golden Bohemian rival. Even before the fair opened in Paris, Austrian official J. John observed: “In the struggle between light and brown beer, it appears that the light is gaining more followers day by day.” Just six years later, when the Austrian capital hosted its own World’s Fair, the Bayerische Bierbrauer reported that Pilsner was “preferred to the famous Viennese beers, even in Vienna.” But Pilsner spread not only as a commodity in trade, but also as a recipe made by brewers far beyond its Bohemian home town. As it traveled, the meanings of the style continued to change, in part because improved technology and consumer preferences drove a convergence of other beers toward the light, clear qualities of Pilsner. Brewers in Pilsen responded to this competition by seeking legal protection for their trade name, but they faced an uphill battle defending their claims in distant courts.

Hopped Up passes the Page 99 Test. The book is about the commodification and global spread of lager beer. Page 99 falls in chapter 3, called “Inventing Pilsner,” about the clear, light, sparkling beer from the Bohemian town of Pilsen that has become a global standard, from Budweiser to Tsingtao. Just as migrations (Germans settling in Siberia, as they had in St. Louis) and stepwise “trickle trade” carried lager beer to Eastern Europe, it also spread through Europe’s global empires as both imperial settlers and colonized peoples alike sought out this symbol of modernity.

The middle paragraph summarizes a section on the transformation of drinking cultures during the industrial era. The urban middle classes went to bucolic beer gardens for leisure while the working classes visited taverns and pubs to purchase beer that they might formerly have brewed at home on the farm. The section particularly questions the meanings of genuine Pilsner when brewers elsewhere could use the same name to sell a similar beer at a cheaper price. There is still a global market for premium brands, but most beer drinkers today purchase local beers, even though the breweries are often owned by giant conglomerates such as AB Inbev.

The final paragraph begins the chapter’s concluding section on the late-nineteenth-century triumph in Europe of golden Pilsners over dark Munich lagers and amber Vienna lagers. Despite the popularity of Pilsner, local variety persisted. These days, the co-existence of Bud Light and craft beer illustrate the power of capitalist market segmentation to sell a beer for every taste and social position. Hopped Up uses beer to demonstrate how commodities have pervaded modern life on a global scale.

Learn more about Hopped Up at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yujin Nagasawa's "The Problem of Evil for Atheists"

Yujin Nagasawa is Professor of Philosophy and Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at the University of Oklahoma. Before joining Oklahoma, he held the H. G. Wood Professorship of the Philosophy of Religion and served as the Co-Director of the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK. Currently, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Religious Studies, published by Cambridge University Press, and as the book series editor for Cambridge Elements in Global Philosophy of Religion. Nagasawa also served as the president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion from 2017 to 2019. He was the principal investigator for the Global Philosophy of Religion Project, a $2.42 million research initiative funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Dynamic Investment Fund at the University of Birmingham, from 2020 to 2023.

Nagasawa applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Problem of Evil for Atheists, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls within Chapter 4, where I develop a version of the problem of evil for axiarchism—a novel alternative to traditional theism that posits the world exists not because God created it, but because an abstract "creatively effective ethical requirement" necessitated its existence. On that page, I explore whether axiarchists can escape the problem of evil by appealing to modal realism, which maintains that all possible worlds exist to the same extent as the actual world, with each being ontologically on a par. However, the Page 99 Test does not capture the full scope of my book, as that discussion only represents a small part of my broader argument—that the problem of evil poses a challenge for almost everyone, including theists, pantheists, axiarchists, and even atheists.

Throughout the book, I argue that traditional theists, who typically embrace supernaturalism, are better positioned to address the problem of evil than naturalist atheists, as the most viable solution requires a supernaturalist framework. Conversely, if atheists manage to develop a successful naturalist response to the problem, traditional theists could adopt it, as theists’ supernaturalist ontology encompasses naturalist ontologies. If my argument holds, the problem of evil should no longer be viewed as a challenge exclusive to traditional theists; it may, in fact, present an even greater challenge for atheists.

Visit Yujin Nagasawa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Doran's "From Tudor to Stuart"

Susan Doran is Professor of Early Modern British History, University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow, Jesus College, University of Oxford.

Doran's academic career at the University of Oxford started in 2002, with teaching posts first at Christ Church and then at St Benet's Hall, Regent's Park College, and St John's College. Since 2008 she has been a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and in 2016 the University awarded her a Professorship. She has written extensively on the Tudors, especially Elizabeth I, and worked with curators to edit catalogues of four major exhibitions in London.

Doran applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I, and reported the following:

Given its size and remit, From Tudor to Stuart could hardly be summarized in one page. Nevertheless the Page 99 Test works well since it makes two statements crucial to Part I of the book, which has as its focus how James VI of Scotland came to succeed Elizabeth I and what problems he faced during his first year as king of England. The first statement is that James’s successful accession on 24 March 1603 occurred only because he was the "last credible heir standing" and no other potential claimants challenged his title. As I explain on page 99, the putative claims of Lord Beauchamp (the great-great grandson of Henry VII), Arbella Stuart (Henry VII’s great granddaughter), and the Infanta of Spain came to nothing.

My second statement on page 99 is that James’s title to the English throne was "plainly dubious" since he was “not the direct heir by statute nor of the queen’s body”. Previously, I describe how and why the English privy council had pretty much elected James but tried to present him as the legitimate hereditary king as well as Elizabeth’s nominated heir. Towards the end of page 99, I tell how the mayor and aldermen of the City of London attempted the same when the proclamation announcing James’s accession was brought to Ludgate and the Tower. There they carried out a “public performance which emphasized James’s legitimacy” in order to counter any opposing views. Later on in the chapter, I demonstrate how the public responded to the confusion concerning James's constitutional position.

Of course, there were other problems that James faced in 1603 – Elizabeth’s legacy, new conspiracies and plague – all of which are discussed on other pages of Part 1, but the uncertainty concerning James’s right to the throne is something I wanted highlighted in the book, and it is clearly there on page 99.

The remainder of the book (Parts 2 and 3) addresses another issue: was James I a different kind of ruler from Elizabeth and was 1603 a watershed in English history? Here I look at the personnel in the court and council, the continued repression of puritans and Catholics, new policies such as union with Scotland, the successful implementation of the Elizabethan drive for overseas colonies and plantations in Ireland, and much else.

Learn more about From Tudor to Stuart at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul M. McGarr's "Spying in South Asia"

Paul M. McGarr is Lecturer in Intelligence Studies at King's College London and author of The Cold War in South Asia, 1945–1965.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book describes the extent to which the Central Intelligence agency (CIA) developed a large and active presence in Cold War India. The CIA operated several stations, or bases of operation, in India that were concerned not only with espionage, or undercovering the secrets of the Indian government and Eastern bloc missions in the subcontinent, but also covert action, or hidden activity conducted to influence political events. Page 99 details how, somewhat paradoxically, and following the outbreak of a brief and bloody war between India and China over a contested Himalayan border, the Indian government turned to the CIA to help it gather intelligence on its Chinese adversary and conduct paramilitary operations intended to destabilise China’s borderlands and occupy Beijing’s security forces.

Appropriately, page 99 provides a clear insight into a central theme in my book. Namely, the complicated, often conflicted, and ultimately counterproductive secret relationship between the CIA and Indian governments during the Cold War. In many ways, page 99 encapsulates in a few short paragraphs the essence of the nearly hundred pages that proceed it and the two hundred or so pages that follow. These expand upon and illuminate the interventions that foreign intelligence services, in the form of the CIA, Britian’s secret agencies, and Soviet bloc bodies, such as the KGB and GRU, undertook in India and the significant and enduring impact these have had on the political and social fabric of South Asia. The spectre of a ‘foreign hand’, or external intelligence activity, real and imagined, has come to occupy a prominent place in India’s contemporary political discourse, journalism, and cultural production. Spying in South Asia sets out how the nexus between intelligence and statecraft in the subcontinent and the relationships forged between external secret agencies and India’s governments to promote democracy came to be associated at all levels of Indian society with covert action, grand conspiracy, and justifications for repression. In doing so, my book uncovers the ongoing and troubling legacy of a fifty-year Cold War battle for hearts and minds in the Indian subcontinent.

Learn more about Spying in South Asia at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Guthman's "The Problem with Solutions"

Julie Guthman is a geographer and Professor of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry.

Guthman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food, and reported the following:

If you turned to page 99 of my book you would first encounter a discussion of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), explaining how they produce cheap human food at a huge cost to animal welfare and the workers who keep the animals alive and reproducing. The text then zooms out to claim how issues with protein production are implicated in several of the grand challenges that supposedly animate Silicon Valley’s entry into agriculture and food. That means, as I write, that so-called “alternative proteins” – those designed to substitute for animal products – “carry a lot of weight for the entire sector in terms of delivering its much ballyhooed impact.”

Page 99 gives you a pretty good idea of what the book is about. For it illustrates that many past agri-food technologies such as CAFOs, which were designed both to make animal agriculture more efficient but also to protect animals from disease, created some of the problems to which Silicon Valley imagines it can better respond. What page 99 doesn’t quite capture, though, is another major point of the book: that Silicon Valley solutions are not up to the task. They are not only guided too much by the hype and funding culture of Silicon Valley; they generally misunderstand the character of food system problems, providing instead overly simple, techno-approaches to deeply complex and fundamentally political problems. It is not clear, for example, that bioengineered plant-based substitutes for burgers are less resource intensive than conventional meat production, inasmuch as they are undoubtedly more humane. And it is far from clear that producing animal product substitutes for the vegan-curious undermines the worst of animal agriculture, as more regulation might do.

Unfortunately, as I describe in the book, Silicon Valley’s wrong-headed, entrepreneurial solution culture has proliferated far beyond the tech sector, including to universities. As such, students are being trained to come up with and pitch the next “big idea” for making the world a better place, rather than dig into the intellectual and practical work of learning the origins of societal problems and how social movements have or can respond to them. Action without reflection and humility is no way to fix food – or anything else of critical importance to life on earth.

Learn more about The Problem with Solutions at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Wilted.

--Marshal Zeringue

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau's "Fitness Fiesta!"

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College and author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, has three screenshots from a commercial called “Let it Move You.” This 2014 marketing campaign advertised Zumba Fitness, a Latin-based dance-fitness program. Many people lauded “Let It Move You” as a progressive campaign featuring people with diverse body types and backgrounds. The three stills on page 99 show a traffic cop, a food truck customer, and an office worker who all spontaneously start to do their Zumba moves at inappropriate times.

Most US fitness programs embrace a “feel the burn” mentality and muscular physique. In contrast, Zumba Fitness’s slogan is “Ditch the workout, join the party!” Page 99 is in a chapter called “Selling Fun” that shows how “fun” in Zumba is intimately tied to racial hierarchies that depict whiteness as disciplined and intelligent, and racial others as instinctual and primitive. Fitness Fiesta! analyzes “tropicalized Latinness,” that is, a top-down construction of “Latin” culture as something carefree, exotic, and hypersexual. In this context, the trope of fun presents Zumba as a space where anything goes, thus implying that Latin culture is completely uninhibited and different from the US mainstream.

The three photos on page 99 illustrate this perfectly. The premise of the commercial is that Zumba Fitness is so irresistible that you won’t be able to stop moving and having fun, even if it is inconvenient or dangerous. One photo on page 99 shows the traffic cop abandoning her duties to dance causing a car wreck. The other two photos show women dancing provocatively. A woman at a food truck does a “booty pop” where she juts out her behind and jumps backwards, disrupting the orderly line. Lastly, the office worker climbs on top of the conference table and slides across it, grabbing her male coworker’s tie and staring lustily into his eyes. These moves conform to the hypersexualized “Latin lover” stereotype that has been endemic throughout US popular culture for decades.

Overall, the photos on page 99 demonstrate an important part of my argument that Latinness is constructed as foreign, exotic, and primitive. But they do not capture a central tenet of the book. Zumba Fitness presents cultural appreciation as central to its ethos even though it also embraces stereotypes of Latinos and Latin culture. Fitness Fiesta! argues that this contradiction mirrors the dangerous assumption that the US is a “postracial” society devoid of racism, when in actuality systemic racism remains pervasive. Page 99 doesn’t grasp this full argument, but it is a good visual representation of tropicalized Latinness in the Zumba Fitness universe.

Learn more about Fitness Fiesta! at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard E. Mshomba's "Africa and Preferential Trade"

Richard E. Mshomba is Professor Emeritus of Economics at La Salle University. Born and raised in Arusha, Tanzania, he received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Africa in the Global Economy (2000), Africa and the World Trade Organization (2009), and Economic Integration in Africa (2017).

Mshomba applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Africa and Preferential Trade: An Unpredictable Path for Development, and reported the following:

Here are the two full paragraphs on page 99 [sources removed]:

The other countries in the Central African group have little to gain from an EU–Central Africa EPA. Chad, the Central African Republic, and São Tomé and Principe are LDCs with access to the [Everything But Arms] EBA program. São Tomé and Principe will be removed from the EBA program in 2024 when it graduates from the LDC category. However, merchandise exports contribute only 3–4 percent of São Tomé and Principe’s GDP. While 70 percent of those exports are destined to the EU, only about 30 percent of those are eligible for the EBA. The rest take advantage of the zero [Most Favored Nation] MFN rate, that is, the duty-free rate for everyone. It is unlikely São Tomé and Principe would sign on to an EPA just so that exports that contribute only one percent of its GDP would have duty-free access. Moreover, São Tomé and Principe is an insignificant market for the EU.

The Republic of Congo qualifies for the EU GSP program. Gabon and Equatorial Guinea do not qualify for the EU GSP because they are in the upper-middle-income category. For all these countries, more than 97 percent of their exports are raw minerals and other products that face zero MFN duties. In 2020, the last year that Equatorial Guinea could have taken advantage of being an LDC, it was not even able (or did not bother) to take advantage of its one percent of exports to the EU that was eligible for the EBA. Unless the EU is willing to give substantial financial aid to these others members of the Central Africa Group as an incentive to join, what is now referred to as the “EU–Central Africa (Cameroon) Economic Partnership Agreement” will, in effect, remain just the EU- Cameroon Economic Partnership Agreement for a long time.

Page 99 highlights some of the differences between African countries, but it does not capture the main point of the book, which is to caution countries on non-reciprocal preferential trade arrangements.

* * *
In this book Mshomba provides analysis on how African countries have or have not benefited from non-reciprocal trade arrangements with the European Union, the US, and China. Mshomba also presents a systematic analysis of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) negotiations for each negotiating group in Africa by examining the specific features of countries in each group. He provides an in-depth discussion on why some countries have been quick to embrace EPAs while others have been ambivalent or outright against them.

According to a famous proverb, “give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Non-reciprocal preferential trade arrangements neither “give a man a fish” nor “teach a man how to fish.” Rather, they offer the promise of a market in which to sell one’s fish. That is, these arrangements encourage preference-receiving countries to “teach themselves how to fish” and to “go fishing on their own,” with the non-binding promise that they will have a market for the fish they are able to catch and sell.

Special and preferential trade arrangements provide opportunities for developing countries to expand their export sector and, potentially, grow their economies. But they are only opportunities. The utilization of these arrangements and the benefits derived from them depend on many factors, both external and internal. The magnitude of the margins of preference, the reliability of the preferences, and the rule-of-origin provisions are among the key external determinants. Internally, the domestic capacity to expand the production of exports depends on political stability, investment policies, access to credit, the quality and reliability of infrastructure, and opportunities for backward and forward linkages in production.

Warning against overreliance on preferential trade arrangements, Mshomba explains that these arrangements must be seen as a ‘borrowed” tool whose life span is not certain. Between 2015 and 2023, 18 African counties had been suspended from the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act for different periods of time. As such, long-term development cannot be made based on it without discounting its future. Of course, when available, these preferential trade arrangements can be used in conjunction with other development tools to expand and diversify the export sector and, in turn, be a source of economic development.

Learn more about Africa and Preferential Trade at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman's "The Power of the Badge"

Emily M. Farris is associate professor of political science and core faculty of comparative race and ethnic studies at Texas Christian University. Mirya R. Holman is associate professor at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. She is the author of Women in Politics in the American City and coeditor of Good Reasons to Run.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book starts the section of our book entitled “Professionalism and Bias in Police Stops” and details the interaction between a mail carrier and a sheriff in Piece County, Washington.

Around 2 am on January 27, 2021, Sedrick Altheimer was delivering newspapers in Pierce County, Washington, when Ed Troyer, the county’s recently elected sheriff, began to follow him in an SUV. After a verbal confrontation where the sheriff cornered Altheimer for driving in and out of driveways, Sheriff Troyer called the police and informed dispatch that Altheimer “threatened to kill me,” prompting a massive police response, with more than 40 police and sheriff cars rushing to the scene. According to testimony from a Tacoma police officer, Troyer later told police he was not threatened by Altheimer. Sheriff Troyer insisted the incident had “nothing to do with [Altheimer] being Black,” but an independent investigation called by the county council found the sheriff exhibited “improper bias” (Brunner and Kamb 2021a; Moran and McDowell 2021) . Following the incident, the Washington State attorney general filed criminal charges against the sheriff for false reporting, and Altheimer filed a lawsuit against the county for damages due to emotional distress from “racial profiling, false arrest and unnecessary use of excessive force of this man whose only crime was ‘being a black man in a white neighborhood.’’’¹ Sheriff Troyer was eventually found not guilty of filing a false report (Brunner 2022b) , even as an investigation by a former U.S. Attorney (authorized by the county) found that the sheriff violated policies on bias free policing (Brunner and Kamb 2021b) . At the same time these events were playing out, three Black deputies in the Pierce County Sheriff’s office won a settlement for over one million dollars in June 2022, accusing the office of pervasive sexism and racism in hiring, management, and promotion practices (Adams 2021), and the office faced another lawsuit from a deputy in 2022 with additional accusations of sexism (Ramirez 2022).
¹While awaiting trial for the criminal charges, a judge found the sheriff violated conditions of his release as he had repeatedly contact Altheimer or asked other law enforcement to do so. The judge order Troyer to post a $100,000 bail and abide by the no-contact and anti-harassment orders (Brunner 2022a).

Page 99 is an excellent representation of the content of the book: in it, we focus on how sheriffs, who are locally elected law enforcement officers, often engage in bad (and racist) behavior and are rarely held accountable for that behavior. One of the main foci of the book is on how sheriffs and their deputies have discretion in the enforcement of the law, particularly around traffic laws. Is it illegal to pull into driveways in a neighborhood where you don’t live? Probably not, but also probably! The set of laws available for enforcement are wide and deep and easily applied or not.

The chapter in which we find page 99 is core to the book: do the attitudes that sheriffs have about groups, including women, people of color, and immigrants, shape their office’s policies? In short, yes. Sheriffs that have more positive views towards women instruct their deputies to connect victims of domestic and interpersonal violence to social services and care. Sheriffs who hold more positive views towards Black people report high rates of training their staff to avoid racial biases. And sheriffs with positive attitudes towards immigrants are less likely to check the immigration status of victims of crimes and witnesses to crimes.

Our book draws attention to sheriffs as an office that has a long history, a powerful role in American politics, and yet is often ignored in discussions of politics, representation, and accountability. In The Power of the Badge, we attempt to remedy some of this oversight by highlighting what sheriffs think and do and why that matters.

Learn more about The Power of the Badge at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael J. Douma's "The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York"

Michael J. Douma is an Associate Professor in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where he is the Director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics.

Douma applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700–1827, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is part of a description about how I converted colonial New York pounds into U.S. dollars and used a consumer price index to consider the effects of inflation on these currencies over time. I'd say the Page 99 Test is not particularly useful for my book, since this is one of the more technical sections of one of the more economics-loaded chapters, which might not appeal to all readers. However, the page does indicate the kind of rigor that went into the book. It is a chapter on slave prices in New York and New Jersey, and how to calculate the average values that New Yorkers assigned to their enslaved people. The page is interesting, as well, because "we" (I brought in a co-author, economist Michael Makovi, for this chapter), produce a novel way to measure the value of the New York pound that doesn't use the British pound as an intermediary, as previous economic historians have done. Yet, at the same time, the chapter relies on previous well-known work by John J. McCusker. The book's subtitle is "A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700-1827." This is one of the more economics-focused chapters, while two others deal mainly with demographics and the rest of the book is concerned with cultural history. However, these approaches to the past overlap in many ways, and as I argue in the book, they complement each other well.

Visit Michael J. Douma's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Phillips's "Einstein's Tutor"

After receiving his PhD in theoretical physics from Dartmouth College and completing his postdoctoral work, Lee Phillips worked for 22 years as a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory. For the past decade he has pursued a career as freelance writer, publishing widely in popular science journals. Phillips lives in Honduras, where he writes and conducts research while studying Spanish.

Phillips applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Einstein's Tutor: The Story of Emmy Noether and the Invention of Modern Physics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Einstein’s Tutor happens to be the last page of Chapter 2 (“Gravity”); as it ends a chapter it’s not a full page, but fills about 3/4 of the space.

On this page we see Albert Einstein taking stock of his mood and situation about a year and a half after completing his greatest work, the General Theory of Relativity, the edifice that still stands as our explanation for gravity and all the phenomena related to it, such as black holes and gravitational waves. At this point in the theory’s career it has impressed the community of physicists and mathematicians by virtue of its unique beauty and coherence, and its ability to resolve some existing puzzles—however it has not faced the ultimate test of new physics, the prediction and confirmation of new phenomena. But Einstein is working on this, and hopes that his theory can be put to the test in the near future.

The page ends with a foreshadowing of the astronomical confirmation that would make Einstein a celebrity. It then points out how this fame would indirectly help to keep the central idea of the book, Noether’s Theorem, on life support long enough for it to become the foundation of the next major development in theoretical physics. The reader is informed that the following chapter will explain what this idea is.

Page 99 is not a bad representation of the tone and substance of the book as a whole. It mentions two of its major characters, and ties together several crucial developments. It’s a pivot: an assessment of the past and the present moment in the historical arc of the book, and a turn to the future. If a reader suffers a violent dyspepsia upon reading page 99, he or she should probably put the book down. But if you enjoy this page, there’s a good chance you will enjoy the whole thing.

I began this journey with a desire to describe the beauty and importance of Noether’s Theorem and its travels though the history of ideas. My research into the Theorem led me to the amazing journeys of Emmy Noether and the people around her. Exploration of archival materials uncovered the story of Noether’s time in America, and to a wealth of details about her life and death that told a story that had never been told before. I never imagined that my desire to explain a physics idea would lead to a tale so filled with drama, pain, heroism, hope, and humor. I am excited to share these discoveries with the world.

Visit Lee Phillips's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mel Stanfill's "Fandom Is Ugly"

Media studies scholar Mel Stanfill researches how individuals interact with various media forms, ranging from television to social platforms. Their work explores the intersections of technology, identity, law and economics in shaping cultural access and interpretation.

Stanfill applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Fandom is Ugly, I discuss how fans who engaged in a large-scale Twitter campaign (#LexaDeservedBetter) to protest the killing off of lesbian character Lexa on CW show The 100 did not have the same level of concern for Lincoln, a Black man character who was killed off the following week. In particular, while there were also Twitter campaigns to complain about his death (#LincolnDeservedBetter), and to point to the combination of the two deaths as undermining the show’s inclusion of marginalized people (minorities are not disposable, without a hashtag), most tweets from the supporters of Lexa did not engage substantively with Lincoln’s death, prioritizing the white lesbian and using Lincoln only to support that cause.

Overall, I do think that page 99 provides good insight into what Fandom is Ugly talks about. One of the book’s key interventions is to push back on the longstanding and widespread assumption that fandom is progressive, a view held by both many scholars and many fans. Such arguments are rooted in a sense that fandom is resistant—whether to media industries in particular or norms in general. This resistance is particularly acute around hegemonies of gender and sexuality. This argument isn’t wrong. Fans are progressive and resistant to various hegemonies. But it’s not the entire story—fans are reactionary and shore up hegemony at least as often, and this case of white queer people failing to take racism seriously shows this clearly.

Another key intervention of the book is to resist the ways media and consumption and pleasure continue to be seen as frivolous and unimportant, both unworthy of study and irrelevant to matters of broad social importance. Through thinking of fandom as having three basic characteristics—public, collective affect, or feels; public, collective interpretation of shared text(s); and identity and community formation structured by affective ties and texts—Fandom Is Ugly is able to think about how these factors are at work in many kinds of ugly public culture, from the January 6 riots to the moral panic around Critical Race Theory. The book takes up fandom as both a site of articulation of power and a mode of articulation of power. It asks both about how fandom as traditionally understood reflects and refracts broader relations of power—and, specifically, domination—and how we understand those broader relations of power better when we look at them with the tools of fan studies.

Visit Mel Stanfill's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brandon Morgan's "Raid and Reconciliation"

Brandon Morgan is a history instructor and an associate dean in the School of Liberal Arts at Central New Mexico Community College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Raid and Reconciliation: Pancho Villa, Modernization, and Violence in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Raid and Reconciliation contains the second half of the last paragraph of the opening vignette to chapter 4, “Solidifying the Border and Straddling the Line: Development and Resistance.” That page also contains the beginning of a section on Andrew O. Bailey’s efforts to promote the town he founded: Columbus, New Mexico (the small, rural town along the border between New Mexico and Chihuahua that is the geographical focus of the book).

The opening vignette describes a case in which Bailey asserted his influence as the founder of the border town to elevate a personal dispute to the level of international diplomacy. He called on U.S. officials in the State Department to investigate the alleged robbery of $18.50 by the Mexican mail carrier who was stationed in Palomas, Chihuahua, just across the international boundary from Columbus. When Bailey called upon U.S. authorities to support his claims, the local Mexican residents involved found that the border posed an obstacle to their ability to challenge the allegations. Ultimately, the case didn’t come to much due to the small amount in question and the towns’ remote location. Yet, the episode illustrates the ways in which the border could simultaneously be a barrier and a conduit depending on relative power relations, national heritage, racial background, and socioeconomic status.

Although readers would need context that comes on the preceding two pages to make sense of the larger story, the main arguments and issues explored in the chapter are discussed on page 99. These are also major considerations of the book as a whole, so I would say that Raid and Reconciliation passes the Page 99 Test.

Learn more about Raid and Reconciliation at the University of Nebraska Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Walker's "Hitler's Atomic Bomb"

Mark Walker is the John Bigelow Professor of History at Union College, Schenectady, New York. His research interests include twentieth-century science, particularly science and technology under National Socialism. His publications include The Kaiser Wilhelm Society during National Socialism (2009) and The German Physical Society in the Third Reich: Physicists between Autonomy and Accomodation (2012).

Walker applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and reported the following:

Page 99 describes part of a rivalry within the wartime German uranium project with regard to designing the best nuclear reactor. The established research group under the direction of the physicist Werner Heisenberg had been working with horizontal and spherical layer designs where uranium oxide or uranium powder and a neutron moderator (a substance that would slow down the neutrons) was arranged in alternating layers. These scientists were challenged by an upstart group of younger, less prestigious scientists who began designing three-dimensional lattices of uranium cubes embedded or immersed in moderator.

My book is a mixture of science and technology on one hand, politics and ideology on the other, and especially how they were intertwined. Page 99 happens to be devoted to the more technical side of this history, which is a necessary, but not sufficient part of the whole story.

Hitler’s Atomic Bomb has two parts, “The Bomb,” which investigates the German work on harnessing nuclear fission for military and economic goals during the war, and “Living with the Bomb,” how these scientists responded to criticism for having worked on such powerful weapons for the Third Reich and eventually managed to rehabilitate themselves by creating legends.

Learn more about Hitler's Atomic Bomb at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Fesmire's "Beyond Moral Fundamentalism"

Steven Fesmire is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Radford University, and 2022-2024 President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. He edited The Oxford Handbook of Dewey (2019), and his books John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (2003) and Dewey (2015) won Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” awards. A 2009 Fulbright Scholar in Japan, Fesmire has previously taught at Middlebury College, Green Mountain College, Siena College, and East Tennessee State University. His public philosophy work has appeared in places such as Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The Humanist.

Fesmire applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Beyond Moral Fundamentalism: Toward a Pragmatic Pluralism, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Especially under current social, economic, and political conditions, non-market-driven values warrant a compensatory emphasis. ...Unfortunately, those socialized to the industrial model [of education] tend to be oblivious to its shrunken framework and its distorting effects.

Page 99 falls in the middle of the third chapter, “Educating for Democracy,” in a section headed by the book’s longest subtitle: “What Do We Lose When We Reduce Education to an Industrial Sector? Cultures of Inquiry, Imagination, Growth, and Fulfillment.” The chapter argues that, by channeling energies toward narrow workforce training, the increasingly dominant industrial model of education conceives service to the private sector as the overriding goal. The chapter explains, updates, and illustrates John Dewey’s alternative, which was to engage occupational callings in a way that contributes to a more humane culture.

Although page 99 doesn’t directly engage the title themes of the book--moral fundamentalism and pragmatic pluralism--it does offer a glimpse of what philosopher Hilary Putnam would have called the book’s “moral image of the world.” The industrial model of formal schooling takes the educative capacity of experience and uses it to reinscribe conventional practices. Yet this capacity is our best hope for growing beyond the reactivity of my-way-or-the-highway moral fundamentalism. In the face of circumstances that overwhelm them, people tend to be reactive—like pinballs ricocheting around a machine. Even at its best, educating worker bees does little to help curb this reactive tendency. But when schooling speaks to living by cultivating moral, intellectual, and aesthetic growth, students can learn to guide changes through inquiry and communication instead of being tossed around or swept away. Educators can simultaneously contribute to wider public comprehension of what is at stake, and to habits that support the public in acting intelligently on that comprehension. So yes, the Page 99 Test works fine to convey the spirit of this book.

More than a synonym for moral absolutism, a moral fundamentalist may be defined, minimally, as someone who acts as if they have access to: (1) the exclusively right way to diagnose moral or political problems and (2) the single approvable practical solution to any particular problem. For a moral fundamentalist, the main moral, social, or political problem is presumed to be that others don’t get the problem, as though events carry their own transparent meanings. We too readily assume that, unlike their concerns, ours are free of interest-driven rationalizations and biases. Moral fundamentalism is a vice because it obstructs communication, constricts deliberation about what’s possible, and underwrites bad decisions. Social inquiry is more honest, collaborative, rigorous, and productive when youths learn to be patient with the suspense of reflection, open to discomfort and dissent, resolute yet distrustful of tunnel-vision, aware of the fallibility and incompleteness of any decision or policy, practiced in listening, and imaginative in pursuing creative leads.

Learn more about Beyond Moral Fundamentalism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Bittmann's "Working for Debt"

Simon Bittmann is a tenured researcher in sociology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the University of Strasbourg.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Working for Debt: Banks, Loan Sharks, and the Origins of Financial Exploitation in the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the opening page of Chapter 4, a part of the book where I delve into cultural history, showing how the “loan shark” problem was framed as an affliction of Northern white breadwinners during the 1910s and 1920s. This is in sharp contrast with the reality of credit experiences (analyzed in the preceding chapters), which rather underline the key role played by “wage loans” for Black households, and Southern Black women specifically. This page actually sums up a core argument of the book, explaining that in the post-abolition era, “whiteness” underpinned many battles for social progress in an industrial, free market society. To quote it in short, in an excerpt that relies on ideas from Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract (1988):

During the 1910s and 1920s, and the advent of consumer capitalism, the loan shark once again tapped into the distant anxiety that “freedom would ultimately bring the end of all domestic order” by replacing ‘organic relations of dependency—between master and slave, husband and wife, the propertied and the unpropertied’ with “the cruel hierarchies of free market relations.” Wage usurers jeopardized the very material and cultural foundations of the postbellum order, as the contractual freedom to build debt collided with the potential enjoyments of free labor.

More generally, Working for Debt studies about how U.S. workers began relying on wages, not property to access credit, at the beginning of the twentieth century. While “loan shark” lending has often been reduced to immoral, and profligate debt, the book contends that small payday and chattel loans, backed by future wages, were massively used by working classes as a flexible credit instrument, to adjust other expenses or debts, and finance small investments. These loans were all at once exploitative and key to survival. While the industrial era is usually associated with the reign of wage earning and along, labor exploitation, here I show that debt and labor remained inextricably bound, especially for those who primarily relied only on their bodily labor as collateral; that is non-whites and women borrowers. So far, workers’ debt has remained largely under-documented, as compared to mortgages or instalment credit, primarily because it remains harder to describe, as it was often not recorded in standard credit surveys or macroeconomic data. To remedy this, I collected a large amount of legal archives, along with “loan shark” business documents, local press clippings, and combined those with more commonly philanthropic sources, reformist surveys, and historical statistics.

In the existing research, consumer credit has often been regarded either as a secondary exploitation, or presented as an alternative to direct welfare, with credit expansion being praised for these opportunities it offered, such as access to consumer goods or housing. In this framework, wage loans are often positioned on the wrong side of a resource/liability divide, associating middle-class credit with future opportunities, and working-class debt with financial burdens. Here, I show that many poor workers were long included within formal credit markets, but on more exploitative terms, as segregation proved profitable for many white lenders. Finally, the credit reforms implemented to eradicate these “loan sharks” essentially led to a form financial exclusion, with many contemporary ramifications for the post-war era and what is now called ‘predatory lending’. Theoretically, I used the framework of racial capitalism to show how financial exploitation produced racialized and gendered experiences of debt among lower-class debtors, underlining how race and gender inequalities were long engrained in the politics of credit expansion. Along the “wages of whiteness”, wage credit proved key in structuring social and economic hierarchies within the working-class, from the Progressive Era to the New Deal.

Learn more about Working for Debt at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Reynolds's "Reading Practice"

Melissa Reynolds is Assistant Professor of early modern European history at Texas Christian University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, Reading Practice, happens to coincide with the end of the introduction to my fourth chapter, which follows natural knowledge that had once circulated in manuscript into print. On that page, I explain that the first printed medical recipe collections, almanacs, and agricultural manuals in England were filled with texts that were quite old, many of which had circulated in manuscript for centuries. I explain that printers who were working to stay afloat in a competitive, commercial print market developed strategies to sell these old texts and argue that these marketing techniques ended up shaping how readers thought about the authority and validity of natural knowledge.

Amazingly, page 99 is a pretty excellent sampling of what readers can find in my book. It captures a central focus of Reading Practice, which is to track readers’ changing attitudes toward books filled with seemingly mundane knowledge as a means of understanding the broader development of a critical attitude toward authority and a curiosity about nature in early modern England.

If an interested reader were to look beyond page 99, they would find that Reading Practice explores how ordinary people living more than 500 years ago grew to accept the premise that books were useful tools within their daily lives. We take that premise for granted, but when books were expensive and written mostly in Latin, such a thought was impossible for most. I begin my examining the books that changed readers’ minds: “practical manuscripts” that circulated in England in the late 1300s and 1400s, containing medical recipes, agricultural directions, herbal knowledge, and the like, written in English for the first time. I show how readers’ interactions with these manuscripts helped them to trust not only books, but their own expertise, too. Then, I trace what happened when this knowledge was commercialized in print. I show that readers became central to the information economy of early modern England, as printers catered to their interests, and as readers in turn recognized their ability to evaluate knowledge for sale in English bookshops. Reading Practice illustrates how, for people living 500 years ago, engagement and analysis of mundane knowledge in quotidian books generated new attitudes toward authorities and toward the natural world.

Visit Melissa Reynolds's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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