Andrew Donnelly's "Confederate Sympathies"

Andrew Donnelly is a literary and cultural historian specializing in the periods of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction and in the field of Southern Studies. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis.

Donnelly applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era, and reported the following:

If you open my book to page 99, you’ll find two paragraphs there quite unlike the rest of the book. The first describes the dogs used by Confederate officers to chase escaping Union prisoners of war. The second focuses on Henry Wirz, the infamous leader of the Confederate prison at Camp Sumter (popularly known as Andersonville), whose use of such dogs and other cruelties to prisoners was described in the judge advocate’s review of the trial that ended in Wirz’s conviction and execution as “This work of death seems to have been a saturnalia of enjoyment for [Wirz], who amid these savage orgies evidenced such exultation and mingled with them such nameless blasphemy and ribald jests, as at times to exhibit him rather as a demon than a man.” What is this page 99 evidence doing in a book ostensibly on cultural narratives of same- sex romance?

I think a browser opening to page 99 would get some interesting stuff—maybe enough to flip back or keep reading, to get more of the book’s main content? Depictions of same-sex romance, in the Andersonville memoirs of these Union prisoners, are but two pages away in this fourth chapter, which is largely about how these white veterans, partly through these homosocial and at times homoerotic narratives, came to be seen as the central sufferers of Confederate atrocity. Here, on page 99, I’m establishing how these memoirs consciously modeled their scenes on abolitionist narratives about slavery’s atrocity. Prisoner-of-war memoirists do not claim merely that they are being hunted by dogs in the manner that enslaved people escaped in anti-slavery narratives but that these are the very same dogs, requisitioned by the Confederate government precisely for their human-hunting capacity. Just as those early narratives pinned the blame for slavery’s worst abuses on demonic individual evildoers (such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Simon Legree or Harriet Jacobs’s Dr. Flint), so does the judge advocate paint Wirz’s singular sadism. I go on from there, but the point is: if enslaved women were the imagined victims of abolitionist narratives, then through the echoing literary form of the prisoners’ memoir (drawing on an argument from historian Ann Fabian), white Union soldiers have taken their place.

One thread throughout the book is about this racialized shift in sympathies. Sympathies cultivated for the figures of enslaved women within antebellum literature entailed many problematic dynamics while they mobilized Northerners toward anti-slavery politics and the Civil War. That those sympathies shifted to the bodies of white male soldiers had devastating political consequences after the war and in Civil War memory. I see it as part of the story by which slavery’s role in the Civil War was diminished in favor of the story of a brother-against- brother tragedy for white Americans.

Visit Andrew Donnelly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clay Risen's "Red Scare"

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century, as well as his most recent book on McCarthyism, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.

Risen applied the “Page 99 Test” to Red Scare and reported the following:

Page 99 of Red Scare drops the reader into the early days of the Hiss-Chambers scandal. In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a journalist and former spy for the Soviet Union, accused the diplomat Alger Hiss of being a Communist, and later of being among his highest-level contacts in Washington. The scene on page 99 is dramatic: Chambers has just told a closed session of the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss was a party member. Richard Nixon, then a young representative from California, and others decide to move to an open session, for the press to see. By the end of the day, these once obscure men were household names, and the fear of Soviet subversion was ratcheted up even further.

A casual browser of page 99 would, I hope, get a sense of the drama that drives the narrative arc of the book. It is full of action and thick description, something I tried to spread across every page. While the story I tell is complex and no single page can reveal it all, page 99 is representative of its flavor and energy.

The book itself is a narrative history of the second Red Scare, showing how anti-Communist hysteria reached into every corner of American life. The Hiss-Chambers affair was high political drama playing out in Washington, but it also showed how the fears inherent in the moment could elevate obscure figures like these two men to fame or infamy.

Visit Clay Risen's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Nation on Fire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes's "The Battle of Manila"

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is a historian specializing primarily in U.S. military, diplomatic, and political history during the World War II and Cold War eras. He is a professor in the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. His books include Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War.

Sarantakes applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War. and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test is an interesting approach to summarizing a book. In the case of my new text, The Battle of Manila—a history of the battle fought between the Americans and Japanese for control of the capital of the Philippines in 1945—the Page 99 Test only half works in trying to capture what is in the book.

Page 99 is the start of chapter seven, which is the section on the 1st Cavalry Division’s liberation of the civilian internment camp at the University of Santo Tomas. The text on the page quickly explains that U.S. civilians and those of other allied nations the Japanese were fighting were located in this prison camp. (They were not prisoners of war, since they were not in the military—but that is a technical, legal distinction.) The Japanese had not done a whole lot to care for the internees and they were slowly starving to death when the U.S. Army arrived in Manila. Reading page 99 gives the readers a good sense of anticipation—far more than I realized until now—of the battle that is to come. It also reflects an approach I use in my writing: the use of good quotes to make events more understandable. (I learned this approach as a reporter for The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas.)

What is missing from page 99, though, is the intensity of the battle. That comes 27 pages later with the start of chapter nine when combat operations begin inside the city of Manila. The book looks at the battle in an effort to use what I call “a whole of army” approach. Battle histories need to focus on the men at the main point of contact, where the actual shooting is happening, but I wondered what were quartermaster, transportation, medical and other support units doing? Answer: they were all trying to support the combat units while getting shot at themselves. (There were no safe areas in Manila). I also used a triangular focus: what were the Americans, Filipinos, and the Japanese doing during the battle? To that end, I did research in Manila, and this book is the first account in English to make use of Japanese-language material.

As a result, I think this book captures—as best as one volume can—the complex battle that took place in Manila in 1945.

Visit Nicholas Evan Sarantakes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gennifer Weisenfeld's "The Fine Art of Persuasion"

Gennifer Weisenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. She is the author of Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923, and Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931.

Weisenfeld applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan. and reported the following:

From page 99:

…Moreover, typographers traditionally considered lowercase types (minuscule) with their pronounced ascenders and descenders to be most legible, enabling easier differentiation between discrete words. Although Asian characters do not have the equivalent of upper-or lowercase, Japanese linguis­tic expression in printed text is polyglot, employing extensive use of romanized scripts, particularly for cosmopolitan cachet and visual emphasis in advertising. Hara responded to this proposition with deep misgivings about the purported benefits of using all lowercase for greater legibility, ultimately dismissing it as a passing fad. Instead, for visual emphasis he would later increasingly employ all-capital roman letters in his title and header designs, both with and without serifs.

Elemental typography was not simply concerned with letterforms but also encompassed the critical relationship between text and image in editorial layout. Hara’s montage poster design for the Hōchi Shinbunsha–sponsored Third Snap Photography Competition of 1935 exemplifies his stark geometric simplification…

When one opens to page 99 of my book, the text and illustration immediately focus the reader on the topic of visible language and the pioneering work of designer Hara Hiromu, a major figure in the history of modern Japanese design, who wrote extensively on modern letterforms and modernist typography. Visible language is a key concept that I develop in the book to explain how designed and aestheticized letterforms, particularly in advertising, communicate through form as well as semantic content. The visible language of letterforms, distinct from text and content but intrinsically allied with them, can also mark different subjectivities and ideological beliefs. Building on expressive native calligraphic traditions and a rich commercial print culture, modern Japanese advertising designers rapidly expanded their lettering lexicon from the late nineteenth century as they encountered Western typefaces and international professional editorial design techniques. This chapter explores the emergence of modern Japanese lettering and typo­graphic design as they were developed in tandem with the professional sphere of advertising. Through close analysis of selected examples of Japanese scripts and types in specific promotional contexts, I illuminate the multilayered and effective mode of visual communication constructed through printed text. The examples range from logotype designs to mass media print publicity. Some are attributed, and others are anonymous. They are sober and whimsical. Em­ploying the distinctive historical, grammatical, morphological, and aesthetic aspects of the Japanese language, designers have been able to create a powerful visible language that has been instrumental in defining product and corporate, as well as cultural and national, identities in modern Japanese visual culture. While this section does not represent the entirety of the book’s content, which spans across twentieth-century Japanese advertising design and its multimodal production for the construction of national brands, it is an excellent example of a key concept and underscores my argument about the importance of language and designed letterforms in advertising.

Learn more about The Fine Art of Persuasion at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julia McClure's "Empire of Poverty"

Julia McClure is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Modern Global History at the University of Glasgow. She is a global historian of poverty, inequalities, charity and empires. McClure specialises in the history of the Spanish Empire in the long sixteenth century, and its significance for the transition to colonial capitalism. Her first monograph, The Franciscan Invention of the New World (2016) explores the role of missionaries in the early Atlantic world. McClure's new book, Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire, scrutinises the role of the ideology of poverty in empire formation. In 2016 she was awarded an AHRC network grant to develop the Poverty Research Network, an inter-disciplinary and international collaboration which aims to deepen our understanding of the historically constructed nature of poverty as a way of offering new insights into how poverty is caused and addressed today.

McClure applied the “Page 99 Test” to Empire of Poverty and reported the following:

Page 99 of Empire of Poverty takes the reader to the middle of Chapter 3, ‘The Moral-Political Economy of Poverty and Theories of Global Sovereignty’. Page 99 focuses on the concepts of wealth and poverty and the politics of obligation contained in the writings of the Italian Jesuit scholar Giovanni Botero (c. 1544 – 1617). It explains that Botero was critical of luxuries and accumulated wealth and advised the state to adopt moral-political economic policies, including taxation, so that only the very richest people in society would be able to adorn themselves with luxury items. Botero warned that the poor should have sufficient resources and saw scarcity as a threat to social and political order. Botero saw providing for the poor as an obligation of the state, since the poor could threaten social and political order if resources were scarce. For Botero this provision of resources for the poor extended to access to employment. Page 99 explains how Botero advocated for moral-economic policies to maintain justice and order across a society defined by inequalities.

The content of page 99 of Empire of Poverty reflects core themes of the book regarding the moral-political economy of poverty and the maintenance of inequalities. Via engagement with the writings of Botero, it provides an example of how moral concepts of poverty and wealth shaped theories of sovereignty and political economic practices for states. Botero discussed the potential for scarcity and disorder in Naples, which at the time was part of the Habsburg Empire. The discussion of Botero’s writings is indicative of some of the main themes in the book, but page 99 does not reflect the book’s broader exploration of the more global dimensions of the Spanish Empire or its extensive engagement with the Indigenous American and Afro-descendant people most affected by Spain’s imperial expansion in the long sixteenth century.

Each of the 6 chapters of Empire of Poverty contribute to main aim of the book to increase understanding of the long history of poverty politics and the roles of moral-political concepts of poverty in imperial state formation, but they also have distinct themes. Chapter One aims to dispel myths about the supposed economic poverty of the Spanish Empire, beginning in the Spanish economic thought of the arbitristas and influencing theories of classic liberal political economy. Chapter Two examines the alternative moral ecologies developed by Indigenous societies prior to the arrival of Europeans as well as the colonial process of the ideological construction of Indigenous poverty. Chapter Three looks at the role of concepts of poverty and moral-political obligations to the poor in theories of state and newly emerging global theories of sovereignty. Chapter Four examines the poverty politics shaping early modern state formation, highlighting the increased governance of the poor, especially their labour. Chapter Five examines how Indigenous people were constructed as poor people in legal terms as part of the political invention of their colonial subjectivity, and then were made poor in socio-economic terms through the dispossessions and subjugations that characterised empire formation. Chapter Five also highlights how Indigenous and Black subjects resisted these processes of impoverishment and subjugation, strategically using the moral-political economic discourses of poverty in petitions made to the Crown. Chapter Six examines the moral-political economy of the Spanish Empire in practice, including uses of the law and regulations of the market. Empire of Poverty concludes with reflections on how poverty politics continue to shape political attempts to maintain order in unequal societies.

Learn more about Empire of Poverty at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jens Ludwig's "Unforgiving Places"

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working group on the economics of crime, elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a member of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science. His work has been featured in leading peer-reviewed scientific publications as well as national media like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and PBS NewsHour, among other outlets.

Ludwig applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, and reported the following:

If one opens up to page 99 in Unforgiving Places, I think they will get a fairly accurate look at the reading and writing of my book. In my case, the Page 99 Test sems to work.

On page 99, I’m explaining that research shows there is not a decrease in gun violence when economic times or circumstances are good. Which is one of the many counterintuitive things I write about in the book: after all, if conventional wisdom says that gun crime is due to economic hardship, shouldn’t the two things be related? But as I show on this page, plenty of research shows that gun violence and economic desperation (or plenty!) are not related at all—one does not seem to have any bearing on the other.

This goes to the heart of the bigger thesis of my book. For decades we have misunderstood the causes of American gun violence, and thus, we have also misunderstood how to reduce it. Far from being the product of poverty, or just “bad people,” gun violence happens because an argument escalates into something more dangerous. Since American politics is not at a point—and may never be—where we can eliminate all guns in the country, or lock up everyone who ever might use a gun, we have to find a new way toward reducing gun violence. The good news, as I detail in the book, is that we already know how to do this—and the solutions are often easier and cheaper than what we are trying to do now.

Learn more about Unforgiving Places at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathanael J. Andrade's "Killing the Messiah"

Nathanael J. Andrade is Professor of History at Binghamton University (SUNY). His books include Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture, and Zenobia: Shooting Star of Palmyra.

Andrade applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Killing the Messiah: The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Killing the Messiah: the Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth contains a photograph. It features the reconstruction of the first-century Temple precinct of Jerusalem that is now on display at the National Museum of Israel. The Temple was the most sacred site for Jews during Jesus’ lifetime. It was also sometimes a locus for outbreaks of crowd violence or insurrection, and it was where Jesus preached during his final Passover Week.

The image is an apt one. Why? Killing the Messiah delves into a longstanding debate about why Pontius Pilate had Jesus crucified. The Temple precinct at Jerusalem is central to what it frames as the most plausible scenario. In his final Passover Week, Jesus preached about a coming reign of God and his own Messianic stature for two days in the Temple precinct’s outer courtyard. On the first day, the preaching of Jesus and his core followers involved some sort of confrontational behavior with money-changers, merchants, and people carrying commercial vessels. Such incendiary activity had serious potential to incite crowd violence at the Temple precinct. Since the Temple’s chief priests had a social obligation to keep innocent worshippers there safe, they initiated countermeasures once they learned of the incident.

On the second day of his preaching, the chief priests confronted Jesus at the Temple and considered arresting him. But because they feared crowd volatility, they let him go. Shifting strategies, they aimed to arrest Jesus at his lodging, away from the Temple’s crowds. As for Jesus, he did not return to the Temple again. Staying in secret locations outside Jerusalem, he only reentered the city for what would become his final Passover meal. Ultimately, the chief priest collected information on Jesus’ location on the Mount of Olives and had him arrested and brought before Pontius Pilate.

When Pilate ascertained that Jesus had engaged in incendiary preaching and conduct at the Temple while posturing as a Messiah, or “King of the Jews,” he had Jesus crucified for sedition. The Gospels’ claims that Pilate believed in Jesus’ innocence and reluctantly had him crucified to appease the chief priests and attending crowd are inaccurate. They reflect how the Gospels distance Jesus from blame for any wrongdoing.

For such reasons, the reconstruction of the Temple precinct on page 99 suits Killing the Messiah very well. As it maintains, Jesus’ conduct at the Temple was pivotal in Pilate’s having him crucified as a seditionist.

Learn more about Killing the Messiah at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Zenobia: Shooting Star of Palmyra.

--Marshal Zeringue

Raphael Cormack's "Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age"

Raphael Cormack is an award-winning editor, translator, and writer. The author of Midnight in Cairo, Cormack is assistant professor of modern languages and cultures at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult, and reported the following:

From page 98:

By the late 1930s Hamid Bey had become a committed American nationalist: “America is to be the next holy land and it is here that the next Christ consciousness will reincarnate. Preparation must be made for this great event, and that is why the Coptic Fellowship of America has been established.”

This is the beginning of the first paragraph of page 98 of Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age (page 99 is only a couple of lines so I am cheating and taking the facing page). It is also a very good encapsulation of one of the key themes of the book. Hamid Bey is a man who started his career in America as a stage performer, doing a fakir act in which he buried himself alive and withstood pain and mutilation. By the 1930s, though, he had moved on from the entertainment business into the world of mysticism and self-help, attempting to guide the American public on a new spiritual path. One of the central themes of my book is the way that the occult gives one of the clearest views of the anxieties and dreams of a particular time and place. Moving between Europe, America, and the Middle East, it traces several different holy men who offer solutions to the chaos of the twentieth century. Here we see Hamid Bey (originally from Italy) adapting his message to the New World and its concerns. Elsewhere in the book we see the fakir Tahra Bey, who won great fame in the uncertain world of 1920s Paris, and Dr Dahesh, a hypnotist-spiritualist who eventually started his own religious movement in 1940s Beirut.

Learn more about Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mia Costa's "How Politicians Polarize"

Mia Costa is a social scientist studying political representation, political behavior, and the politics of race and gender in the United States.

She works at Dartmouth College as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Program in Quantitative Social Science.

For Spring 2025, she is a visiting professor of Government at Harvard.

Costa applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Politicians Polarize: Political Representation in an Age of Negative Partisanship, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book introduces the method of one of the tests I use in the book –a conjoint experiment– and explains how this design allows researchers to estimate the causal effect of multiple things at once, such as a representative's race, party, gender, and rhetoric. The page explains that a basic survey experiment might lead respondents to make assumptions because they are only given limited information. For example, respondents might assume that a candidate using negative partisanship is also ideologically extreme. The passage provides a technical overview of how the method works and why it is well suited to testing how people evaluate candidates based on specific features.

Would readers get a good idea of the whole book just from this page? Not really! But they would get a peek. The page reflects the book's empirical approach and interest in identifying causal effects. And it hints at, but doesn't quite spell out, the main question for this particular test, which is about how political elites view negative partisan rhetoric as an electoral strategy.

This is only one part of the larger argument and patterns shown in the book, and page 99 doesn't yet cover what I find in this particular experiment! I go on to show that candidates and politicians think that voters do not respond favorably to partisan attacks. This is important: a lot of politicians spend time talking about the other party, but they don't actually think it wins votes. So why do they do it? Turns out there are other incentives for engaging in such partisan attacks. Negative partisan rhetoric boosts a politician's national profile, goes more viral on social media, and rakes in out-of-state fundraising. It might not get more votes, but it gets more attention. This type of language by politicians has consequences too. I show that politicians who make partisan attacks are not as effective at actual lawmaking. The good news: politicians actually talk about policy more than they talk about the other party. But it's just not what we hear about.

Visit Mia Costa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Díaz's "After Spaceship Earth"

Eva Díaz is a professor of contemporary art in the Department of the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions, and reported the following:

After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions is concerned with the legacy of architect-designer Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art. It was written following the publication of my book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (2015) that focuses on models of experimental testing—I’m ready for this test!—in the works and teachings of three important Black Mountain College figures in the late 1940s: Josef Albers, John Cage, and Fuller. I came down quite hard on Fuller’s anti-political technocratic utilitarianism in that earlier work, suspicious as I am about his unbounded faith in the power of technology. Yet in the period I was writing about Fuller’s years at Black Mountain I was also a full-time curator of contemporary art, and it was in studio visits and discussions with artists that I regularly heard them express delight about “Bucky’s” projects. In particular, many contemporary artists respond enthusiastically to Fuller’s concept of a hybrid artist-scientist role, as well as his arguments for radical equity in design. Fuller maintained that we have the means to feed, house and clothe the world’s population, and tirelessly sought to redistribute global resources to that end. This is a powerful call for ecological and social justice.

Page 99 is uncharacteristic. In a book that takes up nearly fifty living artists, this page sits in the most historical section of the book when I discuss Fuller’s quixotic life: a figure beloved on college campuses and a designer for the U.S. armed forces; both a guru for the 1960s counterculture and an advocate for global telecommunications networks used for corporate and governmental surveillance. On this page is a large illustration—one of 150 in the book—of a sculpture by Black Mountain College student Kenneth Snelson, an artist whom I interviewed a few years before his death, and whose work was the catalyst for Fuller’s development of tensegrity, a principle of continuous tension/discontinuous compression used in geodesic dome designs. Here my analysis of Fuller’s legacy is embedded in a brief history of his work for the U.S. military constructing radomes, geodesic shelters housing radar defense installations, often in remote arctic outposts.

This chapter ends part 1 of my book, titled “Terrestrial,” which considers works of art and design that use geodesic domes in various ways: as ad-hoc architectural projects grappling with climate change, as spaces of exhibition display and communication design, as proposals to solve housing crises, and, as this chapter probes, as critiques of the pervasiveness of surveillance. The book’s second half, “Extraplanetary,” takes up the influence of Fuller and his acolyte Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, in artworks examining outer space exploration and colonization. The four chapters in this second section interject the important corrective of Afrofuturist thinking into Fuller’s and Brand’s space optimism, and investigate artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space: how the space “race” and off-planet colonization are being reformulated as powerful tools to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices.

Visit Eva Díaz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Nemec's "Brahmins and Kings"

John Nemec is Professor of Indian Religions and South Asian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. The author of three books and numerous articles and other publications, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford, an M.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a B.A. from the University of Rochester. He was an India Fulbright Scholar in 2002-2003, Directeur d'études invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 2016, and the Khaitan Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in 2023.

Nemec applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Brahmins and Kings: Royal Counsel in the Sanskrit Narrative Literatures, and reported the following:

Brahmins and Kings examines the advice given to political leaders. It does so by reading the most well-known and widely circulated of Hindu stories from India's antiquity.

On page 99 of the book, the subject-matter is the famed Hindu epic, the Rāmāyaṇa. It points out that there is something going on in the text. The hero of the epic, Rāma, kills a wayward king, who was an effective but evil political leader. He does so because this enemy king, a half-demon named Rāvaṇa, lacked the kind of personal restraint required to govern wisely. In fact, Rāvaṇa was sexually deviant, and he had kidnapped Rāma's wife for this reason.

The wrinkle in the story that is examined on page 99 is this: Rāvaṇa's family actually has roots in the most well-placed people of society, the Brahmins. These are the ones who are said to be best able to give good advice to political leaders, because they are (supposed) to live it and breathe it.

Simply, on page 99 it is pointed out that the moral of the story is that everyone in society has to take care of their own self-restraint. Each of us must cultivate a measured approach to life—an inner life—, what I refer to in the book as the Virtue Ethic of the narratives. With this ethic comes the self-restraint that allows kings and other political leaders (and all of us) to act in the greater interest, to see the world for what it really is instead of what they want it to be, to act with wisdom and care, and also to succeed in one's goals in life thereby.

If you read page 99, you'll get a good sense of this book. This is a book about learning how to be a just and upright person in the world. The book argues that being "good" in this way leads one to do well in the world—to succeed at one's goals in life. The goals pursued are not just proper action and morality and adherence to the law. They also include the pursuit of power, wealth, and fame, as well as the pursuit of pleasure—that is, pleasure in art, but also personal enjoyment of every kind, so long as engaged properly (example: not in adultery). And, finally, the virtue ethic even helps cultivate spiritual emancipation, heaven or liberation after this life.

The book examines this advice as told in stories, because stories are really good at making their audiences directly feel and imbibe the ideas they embody. Stories can transform their audiences because the medium of storytelling is so engaging.

This is the message of the book in a nutshell. It is, I argue, what the authors of these stories wished to say. So for those who have read or might want to read some of the most fascinating and exciting of any stories ever written—including epic tales, historical accounts of kings in Kashmir, fantasy stories about flying magical beings and the like, animal fables that give parable-like advice, and Sanskrit dramas and poetry that address the good life of the king and his beautiful life in the court—this book can serve as a guide and companion.

Learn more about Brahmins and Kings at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zev Handel's "Chinese Characters across Asia"

Zev Handel is professor of Chinese linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. He is author of Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script and associate coeditor of Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics.

Handel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book describes the Chinese conquest of the northern part of the Korean peninsula over 2,000 years ago, an area in which writing was previously unknown. It explains how Chinese military control led to the establishment of a Chinese-style government administration and bureaucracy, which introduced Chinese writing to the region. After the Goguryeo kingdom re-conquered the region, wresting control from China, the kingdom continued to administer the region on the Chinese model.

In one respect, a reader browsing to page 99 would get a fairly good idea of the topic of the book, which is focused on the early history of the spread of Chinese writing into the areas of modern-day Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. The information presented on page 99 is important historical context for the way in which writing spread and was adapted beyond the borders of China proper. In another respect, however, page 99 is not typical. Most of the book deals with concepts and examples related to the adaptation and application of Chinese characters to writing non-Chinese languages. The first few chapters explain how Chinese characters were invented and how they function, in comparison with alphabetic writing. In doing so, they dismantle a number of common myths and half-truths about Chinese writing. Following chapters explain how Chinese characters were learned and conceptualized outside of China, before exploring the different ways they were adapted to represent other spoken languages in writing. It is these sections that constitute the heart of the book. For example, pages 108 to 121, building on the historical background on page 99, describe a song in the Old Korean language that was composed well over 1,000 years ago and explain how its words and sounds are represented using adapted Chinese characters.

Later chapters explore how written Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese eventually took on the forms known today, and investigate the question of whether Chinese characters might constitute a kind of universal writing that transcends language differences. (Answer: they don’t.) Because the book is intended for a general readership, all of these concepts are illustrated with thought experiments involving English, and do not presume any knowledge of Chinese characters or the various languages under discussion.

Learn more about Chinese Characters across Asia at the University of Washington Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brendan A. Shanahan's "Disparate Regimes"

Brendan A. Shanahan is a Lecturer in the Department of History and an Associate Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He teaches courses on (North) American immigration and citizenship policy and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. He served as a postdoctoral associate at Yale's Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, earned his PhD and MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his BA from McGill University.

Shanahan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965, and reported the following:

Readers who jump ahead to page 99 of Disparate Regimes will read an excerpt that gets to the heart of the major themes, recurring methodologies, representative historical episodes, and chronological hinge points of the book (though they may find themselves thrown in the proverbial deep end without important context developed in the surrounding pages).

Page 99 examines two political and legal disputes in Progressive Era Massachusetts. Both centered on the Bay State constitution’s long-standing anti-alien apportionment provision (a policy which counted noncitizens out of the population for the purposes of redrawing state legislative seats). Much of the page examines efforts in 1916 by James Brennan, then a leading Democratic politician and powerbroker in Boston, to gum up the operation of – if not outright flout – the implementation of the state’s anti-alien apportionment policy. As chairman of the commission responsible for reapportioning state House seats to the various wards of Suffolk County (home to Boston), Brennan offered numerous extraconstitutional reasons for trying to assign extra seats to his own district and wards represented by his political allies. These neighborhoods often had large noncitizen immigrant populations, which were not supposed to be counted for the purposes of state legislative representation. Brennan’s efforts proved unsuccessful, with his political adversaries scoring multiple victories against his plans in court. The page concludes by jumping ahead to 1917. It shows how Brennan tried (and ultimately failed) to convince his fellow lawmakers to repeal the state’s anti-alien apportionment policy as a delegate to the Bay State’s World War I-era constitutional convention.

Though a bit more technical than most of the book’s pages, page 99 offers a representative window into Disparate Regimes as a whole. My book shows how state governments retained significant power and exercised discrete powers to shape the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the United States between the Civil War and the Civil Rights era, a century often portrayed as a time of ascendant federal authority in matters pertaining to immigrants and immigration. It does so by examining how state politicians, jurists, and constituents (from blue-collar nativists and members of professional associations to immigrant workers and their advocates) battled over the passage and implementation of a range of alienage laws (policies governing the rights of noncitizens vis-à-vis citizens).

I argue that debates over state noncitizen voting rights policies, anti-alien apportionment provisions, blue-collar nativist hiring laws, and anti-alien professional licensing measures produced disparate regimes of citizenship rights on a state-by-state basis between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I further contend that continued disputes over the adoption, repeal, and/or enforcement of such policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in the American political economy by the mid-twentieth century in law, politics, and popular perception. Page 99 thus gets to the core of the book’s overarching arguments and illustrates their importance by zooming into two representative historical episodes.

Learn more about Disparate Regimes at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Messner's "The High School"

Michael Messner is a professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. He is the author of such works as Power at Play and Taking the Field.

Messner applied the “Page 99 Test” to The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024, his twentieth book, and reported the following:

When a reader flips to page 99 in The High School, they find two clusters of photos, reproduced from the 1944 Salinas High School yearbook. The seven black and white photos show girls doing calisthenics and modern dance, with captions ranging from the mildly scolding “Up and down! Up and down!” to the promise of feminine attractiveness to be gained through dance: “Grace…poise…and beauty.”

A reader would get a decent hint of the book’s content on page 99—after all, The High School contains 270 photos reproduced from yearbooks from 1903 to 2024, and focuses largely on the shifts and turns in girls’ sports over that time. The middle decades of the 20th century was a time of backlash against girls’ interscholastic sports, when physical activity for girls was largely relegated to non-competitive activities like dance. The few photos of girls actually playing a sport were often accompanied by insulting captions that underscored girls’ apparent athletic incompetence. As such, sports during this time both reflected and reinforced the idea that boys and men were naturally athletic and deserved center-stage attention, while girls were relegated mostly to the sidelines to cheer the boys on. A reader might understand some of this simply by looking at page 99.

But this snapshot in time would not reveal the larger scope of the book’s story. The half-century that included 1944 was bracketed by a wave of feminist-inspired girls’ interscholastic sports in the early 20th century, and of course by a surge of girls’ sports following the 1972 passage of Title IX, which continues today. Nor would page 99 suggest other threads in the book that focus on shifts and changes in high school cheerleading, coaching, and student activities—all contextualized by demographic change, shifts in political economy, wars, and developments in public schools and youth culture.

Visit Michael Messner's website.

The Page 99 Test: Guys Like Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher J. Insole's "Negative Natural Theology"

After teaching at the Universities of London and Cambridge, Christopher J. Insole took up his post at Durham in 2006, where he is Professor of Philosophical Theology and Ethics. He has published on realism and anti-realism, religious epistemology, the relationship between theology, metaphysics, and political philosophy, and on the thought of Immanuel Kant. His books include his two major studies of Kant's relationship to theology. His recent research has moved into a more contemporary and constructive key, engaging with the category of natural theology, as it meets the limits of reason and knowledge.

Insole applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Negative Natural Theology: God and the Limits of Reason, and reported the following:

Looking again at this page, I picture myself sat at the kitchen table with a convinced and ideological humanist, of the ‘believing in God is stupid’ variety. I’m showing the humanist some uncomfortable evidence, perhaps incriminating photos, or documents. It’s not fun for the humanist. But I’m not being mean, and I’m not revelling in it. I’m holding the humanist’s hand, and I’m sharing the pain: because, as I say at the bottom of the page ‘I take it that every variety of worthwhile commitment and worldview has its own weaknesses, pathologies, tensions and paradoxes’, and as I say on the next page, ‘a worldview without problems is probably too simplistic and reductive, and not worth defending or inhabiting’.

Because this is what the book is all about: tensions and fragmentations and limitations in our lives and thinking. I’m interested in these, and how and why some thinkers lean into the concept of God at this point, as an expression of their yearning for a type of wholeness and healing, whilst others resolutely set themselves again the idea of God (or, at least, against the word). I do a lot of hand holding in the book and sympathetic nodding, trying to understand the deep motivations for these different type of reaction.

The chapter on humanism comes after a discussion of absurdism (Albert Camus) and Karl Rahner’s notion of mystery, and before a chapter on William James and modern paganism. What is the ‘incriminating evidence’ I’m showing the humanist? Well, it’s this. There are two core commitments within humanist discourse: first of all, that we only believe things where there is strong empirical evidence, amounting to something like ‘objective knowledge’. Secondly, humanists really believe that studying objective truth ('science') will make us happier and more whole as humans. On page 99 I am gently suggesting that these two commitments don’t obviously sit comfortably with each other. Believing in the palliative goodness of objective truth looks a bit like a ‘religious’ leap of faith; but, we are not permitted to take such leaps, if we are restricted to ‘objectivity’. What if, I ask, ‘in the end truth, perhaps, is sad?’.

And I feel, here, a bit sad for the humanist. Being religious, I don’t mind people making such leaps, and I hope that my humanist companion might embrace a bit of inconsistency and subjectivity, and carry on leaping. If it helps.

Learn more about Negative Natural Theology at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lincoln Mitchell's "Three Years Our Mayor"

Lincoln Mitchell is an instructor in the School of International and Public Affairs and the political science department at Columbia University. He has written numerous books, scholarly articles, and opinion columns on American politics, foreign policy, the history and politics of San Francisco, and baseball. In addition to his academic interests, Mitchell has worked in domestic political campaigns and on foreign policy projects in dozens of countries, particularly in the former Soviet Union. Mitchell earned his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his PhD from Columbia University. He lives in New York and San Francisco.

Mitchell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Three Years our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco focuses on the San Francisco elections of 1963. This was important election for the city because, believe it or not, it was the first time a Democrat was elected mayor in over half a century. Since the election of Jack Shelley, a Democrat who before becoming mayor was a member of the US House of Representatives representing San Francisco, no Republican has served as mayor of that city.

When San Franciscans went to the polls to elect Shelley over Republican candidate Harold Dobbs, they also voted for six members of the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco’s equivalent of the City Council. Those members were elected citywide, and the race was quite competitive. Four incumbents were elected relatively easily, but the race for the sixth and final spot on the Board was very close. The winner was a 34-year-old lawyer named George Moscone.

Page 99 describes how Moscone drew on his deep roots in San Francisco, natural charisma and good looks, record as an all-city basketball player and the liberal moment to win that election. The page ends with a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle describing Moscone and Leo McCarthy, the two newly elected supervisors as rising stars.

This page describes a critical moment in George Moscone’s life. After winning that election, Moscone would spend the rest of his life in elected office. That 1963 election was also an important turning point in the politics of San Francisco. Shelley and Moscone’s victory kicked off an 18-month period that saw the ascendancy of Phil Burton to Congress and John Burton and Willie Brown to the State Assembly. Brown, Moscone and the Burtons were instrumental in remaking San Francisco politics and pushing it leftward. Their proteges, including, among others Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, were important Democratic Party leaders well over half a century later-and to a great extent it began with that 1963 election.

Visit Lincoln Mitchell's website.

The Page 99 Test: San Francisco Year Zero.

The Page 99 Test: The Giants and Their City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shari Rabin's "The Jewish South"

Shari Rabin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion at Oberlin College. A historian of American religions and modern Judaism, she received her PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University in 2015. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America, was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Rabin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Jewish South: An American History, and reported the following:

The only full paragraph on page 99 of my book reads:

In Richmond, Reverend George Jacobs kept a list of the soldiers whose funerals he had performed; they came from Louisiana, Texas, and South Carolina, as well as Virginia. Charleston’s Jewish cemetery records the fates of Isaac D. Valentine, felled in June 1862 during the battle of Sessionville; of Isaac Barrett Cohen, killed in January 1865 at Fort Fisher; and of Marx E. Cohen Jr., killed on March 19, 1865, at age 26, “on the battlefield of Bentonsville, N.C. . . . by volunteering the performance of a service in which he lost his life.” In death these men were cast as heroic Jewish Confederates, although in life those two identities did not always prove so stable or harmonious, in personal experience or in the minds of their fellow white southerners. For them, the war was over, but for the families and communities that survived them it would last much longer, confronting them with important new choices about how to understand the recent past and what kind of future to build.

I think this gives a good sense of the book, although it is the end of a chapter and only a half of a page! It’s also worth noting that the book covers a very broad temporal scope, from the 1660s to the 1960s.

The Civil War is central to understanding the American South and to my study, however. On this page and throughout the book, I tried to present southern Jewish history in all of its complexity. Many have assumed that all southern Jews were supporters of the Confederacy and that wartime antisemitism was limited to the North. My chapters on the Civil War show that Jews – like other southerners – could be ambivalent about secession and war and that they did experience forms of exclusion. And as this page notes, the Civil War would cast a long shadow on the South and the nation for decades to come. Finally, this page highlights my original research, my interest in gravestones as primary sources, and my literary style. I really tried to write a historical study that was based on rigorous research but that would also keep the attention of a broader reading public.

Visit Shari Rabin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Jay Sosa's "Brazil's Sex Wars"

Joseph Jay Sosa is an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Bowdoin College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Brazil's Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo, and reported the following:

In the 2000s, São Paulo, Brazil claimed the largest LGBTQ Pride parade in the world, a figure celebrated by queer activists, questioned by local reporters, and challenged by religious conservatives. The parade, and particularly its size, seems like an odd point of contention in debates over gender, sexuality, rights, and identity. But as my book, Brazil’s Sex Wars, elaborates, seemingly trivial disagreements like those over crowd size stood in for larger struggles to define the role of LGBTQ human rights projects in Brazil’s story of modernity, democracy, the rise of the authoritarian right.

Page 99 brings the reader into the thick of the action. In a chapter on the promise and perils of visibility, we are dropped into a scene where queer activists debate what it means to “assume one’s identity” (the Brazilian version of “coming out”) in an urban crowd where one stood little chance of being singled out by journalists’ cameras. This example is one of a coterie of strategies activists used to deploy their bodies in the urban space to aestheticize and transform the meaning of human rights.

Does page 99 convey the central argument to the reader? Probably not in the sense that the reader couldn’t articulate ‘what the book is about’ from that page alone. But it does convey themes that are central to the book. How did urban and media performances actively (re)shape human rights paradigms in a decade of political transition in Brazil? How do activists deploy rights aesthetically, ie. getting the public to see (and think and feel) about rights in the same way they do? Finally, how has the language of rights, once the domain of the left, been taken up across the ideological spectrum?

Learn more about Brazil's Sex Wars at the University Of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alison Brysk's "Abortion Rights Backlash"

Alison Brysk is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a past Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson Fellow and is the author or editor of 18 books on human rights, including The Struggle for Freedom from Fear (2018).

Brysk applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Abortion Rights Backlash: The Struggle for Democracy in Europe and the Americas, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Abortion Rights Backlash: The Struggle for Democracy in Europe and the Americas reveals a key feature of the transnational context that shaped a key case--Argentina--and highlights my book's uniquely global take on the drivers of national reproductive rights policies. But page 99 is not fully representative of the book's larger comparative analysis of the struggle between liberal globalization and ethnonationalism for control of women's bodies that plays out through democracy--and affects democracy's future.

On page 99, I discuss the regional Latin American Green Wave of abortion rights liberalization across Mexico, Colombia, and beyond that both supported and amplified Argentina's peak national movement. Argentina was the first Latin American country to legalize abortion in 2020 and has led the region in connected regional movements against femicide and for LGBTQ rights. Such transnational networking has been a key part of reproductive rights advocacy worldwide--and transnational abortion medication and migration flows help to compensate for backlash in some areas. But transnational ties are only one factor with different levels of influence, often outweighed by patriarchal forms of populism in the backlash cases of Brazil, Poland, and the U.S.

The larger vision of the book--to explain what is happening to our rights--can be best represented on a different page (p. 33-34): "In times of social crisis, deliberalizing the gender regime promises to push women out of the competitive workforce, increase the national population of threatened identity groups, restore religious governmentality to substitute for failing governance, and calm social anxieties about economic displacement and chronic insecurity, with compensatory affirmation of motherhood....The particular potency of populist nationalism is linked to struggles over gender roles, family policy, and reproductive rights worldwide."

In the rest of the pages, the book goes on to offer some lessons on how to defend our rights in an era of backlash. We can learn from the democratic political features and processes that shaped the disparate outcomes across the cases--from courts vs. Congress to the availability of popular referendums to feminist mobilization. The cases also suggest ways to transcend the culture wars triggered by the identity crisis of globalization by building more inclusive national identities and bridging gender justice to community values.

Visit Alison Brysk's website.

The Page 99 Test: Speaking Rights to Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew S. Berish's "Hating Jazz"

Andrew S. Berish is associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s.

Berish applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse, and reported the following:

Opening Hating Jazz to page 99 takes you to first page of chapter four, “The Musicians Suck: Contempt and Disgust in the Historical Reception of Jazz.” This is the penultimate chapter of the book and covers the kinds of jazz hating that happen—perhaps surprisingly—within the jazz community: critics savaging musicians, musicians denouncing critics, and musicians attacking each other. The title comes from an interview with saxophonist Branford Marsalis: in an April 2019 interview with Rachel Olding of the Sydney Morning Herald, Marsalis, reflecting on why the music is so unpopular says, “the answer is simple: the musicians suck.” It is one thing to criticize another musician, but Marsalis offers something much stronger, an expression of contempt toward others in the jazz community. In the rest of the chapter I trace the history of these kinds of responses, responses where jazz friends “fire” on each other. From the battles in the 1930s and 40s between the proponents of New Orleans-style small group jazz and the new sounds of the big bands to the polarizing debates about free jazz in the 1950s and 60s to the more recent discussions of jazz’s relationship to rap and hip-hop, jazz history has been defined by these explosive debates full of aggression, contempt, and disgust. There are many reasons for this, but at its heart, such overheated attacks are rooted in love—only a profound betrayal of values can unleash such negativity. As Freud noted long ago, love and hate are twins.

The opening of chapter four on page 99 lays out the stakes of this love-hate dynamic: jazz musicians play to create and share profound emotional experiences of sound and community. A key foundational argument for the book is the idea that attacks on music—on the specific sounds that musicians make—is only half the story. What also matters are people. Hating (and loving) jazz is a social act. For a music born in the Black American experience, jazz has been, from the beginning, about race, specifically Blackness and whiteness. Loving and hating jazz has always been about the lived Black experience but also the representations and images of that experience. This gives arguments about jazz enormous social significance. We are never arguing only about sounds we find pleasant or unpleasant, uplifting or infuriating, but about the meanings those sounds have for our very sense of self in a society shaped by the distortions of racial thinking. Hating—and loving—jazz exists at the intersection of sound, feeling, and social life. Although my book is focused on the specific history of jazz, these arguments are applicable to all kinds of music: heavy metal, pop, rap and hip-hop, and country. In the study of popular music history, focusing on the negative reception of a style or genre—from statements of mild dislike to tirades filled with contempt and disgust—reveal with great clarity the profound social stakes in our musical tastes.

Visit Andrew S. Berish's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda M. Greenwell's "The Child Gaze"

Amanda M. Greenwell is associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Her work has appeared in African American Review; Children’s Literature; Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; The Lion and the Unicorn; Studies in the Novel; Studies in the American Short Story, and other publications.

Greenwell applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature, and reported the following:

If readers were to flip to page 99 of the book, they’d learn that the narrative technique I term the transactional child gaze “does not simply locate the child in the ideological environment…[but rather] enmesh[es] the child with the environment in the moment of seeing, binding them together in the ongoing alchemy of subjectivity and perspective.” The page emphasizes the necessity of active, ongoing reflection on the part of the literary child who looks transactionally, which asserts the child as “extant and active” within systems often built to oppress them. Children who look transactionally are depicted as enormously affected by their environments, but not necessarily deterministically; the transactional child gaze, due to the child’s agency, is a potentially destabilizing force.

Page 99 falls on the third page of chapter three, and it hosts a great passage to help readers understand the premise of the chapter, though not the whole book. It captures some of the key introductory concepts that will be explored later in the section through close readings of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Ultimately, the chapter argues that “the transactional child gaze allows an interrogation of the ideological scripts that are brought to bear upon the child as well as the visual methods by which they interpellate the subject” (131).

The page only manages to convey a hint of the larger scope of the project, however. It makes brief reference to the appreciative child gaze and the countersurveillant child gaze, which are discussed in chapters one and two, respectively, but it does not describe those modes of gazing. Readers will have to visit those chapters to learn how and to what effect the appreciative child gaze conjures reactions along a spectrum of celebration to weighty consideration, and to understand the various methods by which a countersurvelliant child gaze creates striking indictments of abusive power on the level of narrative, even when child looking does not effect real change within the storyworld of the text. And nothing on page 99 would point readers to the fourth chapter, which explores the manifestation of these various modes of child gazing on the comics page, including depictions of the direct gaze, which implicates the reader through the fourth wall.

The central premise of the book might be inferred from page 99: that literary texts invoke several modes of child looking to perform social critique. However, it would not make clear how the book draws on work in the cultural history of the American child, children’s literature, rhetorical and critical race narratology, visual culture studies, and several other fields to craft a critical conversation that helps us comprehend the various ways US texts from the 1930s to the 2010s employed nuanced child gazing to talk back to hegemonic US structures of national belonging. And readers would miss out on the call for further work on the child gaze in the future!

Learn more about The Child Gaze at the University Press of Mississippi website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katie Rose Hejtmanek's "The Cult of CrossFit"

Katie Rose Hejtmanek is Professor of Anthropology and Children and Youth Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the author of Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop: An Ethnography of African American Men in Psychiatric Custody and co-editor of Gender and Power in Strength Sports: Strong as Feminist. She is also a world and national champion in masters weightlifting.

Hejtmanek applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Fitness Phenomenon tells the story of the CrossFit Hero WOD Murph. Hero WODs are very difficult workout of the day (WOD) named for a fallen US soldier usually during the war on terror. Murph is named after Lieutenant Michael Murphy, a Navy SEAL, and his favorite workout that he called “body armor.” The page provides granular detail of Murph and how CrossFitters relate to this workout, especially as it is performed on the American holiday of Memorial Day. However, the larger story of CrossFit in the United States I try and examine in the book is not part of page 99.

I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book because page 99 is about Murph, one small piece of the CrossFit puzzle, one (important) tree in a very large unexamined-on-page-99-forest.

So, what’s the forest?

The Cult of CrossFit is a book constructed through my anthropological investigations of and embodied commitment to CrossFit workouts like Murph. But CrossFit isn’t just about the workouts. It’s a whole forest of frameworks, beliefs, devotions, communities, futures, pasts, ideologies, and stories that are lived out and built into a CrossFitter’s body, gym, and community. Based on seven years of anthropological research on six continents, The Cult of CrossFit reveals how American CrossFit organizes, frames, and sells this forest using what I call cultural Christianity. This isn’t the Christianity preached in the church. It is the everyday Christianity that permeates much of the United States: in the holidays we have, sayings we use (bless you), and redemption stories we tell based on hundreds of years of history. Thus, the book is as much about American history and culture as it is about CrossFit. Using the lens of CrossFit, The Cult of CrossFit reveals how violent, militaristic, devotional American culture and nationalism get embodied, one workout at a time. While page 99 goes into detail about one punishing, military-infused workout, Murph, it leaves out the larger context of suffering, devotion, salvation, forms of oracle and garage capitalism, illusions of science, and understandings of the apocalypse that are also part of American CrossFit.

I encourage you to read the rest of the book if you are interested in a detailed history and cultural analysis of how the brand and community of CrossFit, which includes Murph, became the phenomenon that it is.

Visit Katie Rose Hejtmanek's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arie W. Kruglanski and Sophia Moskalenko's "The Psychology of the Extreme"

Arie W. Kruglanski is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland and a co-founding PI at START, the national center of excellence for the study of terrorism and the response to terrorism.

Sophia Moskalenko is a Research Fellow at Georgia State University and a Program Management Specialist at the UN Office of Counter Terrorism, Behavioral Insights Hub.

Moskalenko applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Psychology of the Extreme, and reported the following:

A reader opening the book to page 99 would read about the violent extremism of two Islamic fundamentalists who conducted mass casualty attacks: one against Israelis in Israel, and the other against Americans in Iraq. The page touches upon the psychology that is needed to overcome the normal human resistance to violence, such as the influence of extremist narratives of terrorist groups, the pain of personal humiliations experienced by the attackers, and the motivation to restore the loss of significance.

This page is perhaps not the best representation of the book. Especially because the book’s message was to broaden the understanding of extremism: from the malicious actions of terrorists to the great deeds of luminaries such as Maria Sklodowska-Curie, humanitarians such as Mahatma Gandhi, artistic geniuses like Van Gogh, and other extremists whose pursuit of their passions positively contributed to culture, technology, arts, and sciences. What’s more, the book makes the case that extremism is far more prevalent than these famous cases. It extends to our friends and neighbors (and maybe ourselves)­­––those who give their best efforts and sacrifice for a hobby, a job, an obsession, a relationship, or an addiction. In other words, the book presents extremism as not rare, and that it’s becoming more frequent with the advent of the internet and social media that encourage comparisons, competition, and as a result, extremism.

It helps to see extremism through this wider lens because we can see its origins. Extremism develops in social isolation, often as a result of rejection, bullying, and ostracism. It is often encouraged by radical groups through narratives that glorify self-sacrifice. Stories of heroes overcoming the odds are riveting and inspire emulation. Extremism is glorified by modern Western culture. What hides behind this façade are the costs of extremism, even the constructive kind: to the extremists themselves, their loved ones, and to societal peace and harmony. Through case studies and psychology research, the book shows that moderation, kindness, and diligence can often succeed where extremism fails miserably. Seeing extremism for what it is allows us to make better, more informed choices in our Age of Extremism.

Learn more about The Psychology of the Extreme at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's "The Politics of Sorrow"

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is a professor of literature and creative writing at Villanova University. She is the author of the poetry collections My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (2011), In the Absent Everyday (2005), and Rules of the House (2002), as well as the memoir Coming Home to Tibet (2016). Her mother served as a member of parliament in the exile government for three terms.

Dhompa applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, and reported the following:

On this page I write about Tenzin Norbu, a monk I interviewed in Bir, India in 2015. Norbu defined the campaign of “unity,” (led by a Tibetan political party in the 1960s) as a responsibility disproportionately placed on new minority populations in exile.

For him, unity had spelled erasure…Tenzin Norbu insisted he desired to be ‘heard’ by the exile government, which I interpreted as his and the Thirteen’s desire to be included in the narrative of the united nation. Separation was most certainly not on his mind.

My first thought on scanning the page (the first half of the page describes a historical event in the seventh century) was that it didn’t provide a good idea of the whole work but on a closer examination I was stunned at how this page indeed gets to the heart of what the book is about: recognition and belonging in exile.

Tenzin Norbu lived in one of the refugee settlements established by the Group of Thirteen and he felt the group had been miscast as antigovernment simply because they were slow to embrace some of the policies enforced by the Tibetan United Party (a powerful organization in the 1960s-70s in the Tibetan exile communities in India and Nepal). Norbu felt that the project of unity led by the United Party was exclusionary. He stated that he never got the chance to explain why he was hesitant to follow their call to unity. His understanding of events and experience of events confirmed his fear that unity meant a standardization of Tibetan identity to a homogenous formation. His desire was to be integrated in a meaningful way. He was asking important questions: What is the relationship between the government and the people? Where are we going? Who is included in the story of the nation?

The book focuses on the first two decades of life for Tibetans who had fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and found themselves refugees in India and Nepal. In addition to the difficult task of organizing an anti-colonial national movement, and establishing a government-in-exile, the community had to respond to complex internal tensions over what it meant to be a Tibetan. While it was easy to galvanize Tibetans to identify a shared timeline to the loss of a nation or feel certainty in not being Chinese, building solidarity behind the idea of what made a Tibetan, a Tibetan proved more complex because people had come from diverse regions and from a variety of political and social formations. The story of the Thirteen in The Politics of Sorrow is a glimpse of exile history from the periphery.

Learn more about The Politics of Sorrow at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue