Joseph Kellner's "The Spirit of Socialism"

Joseph Kellner is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Georgia.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse finds one Sergei Chevalkov, formerly a colonel in the Soviet Union’s land-based nuclear defense forces, late in the process of converting to a millenarian sect. In keeping with one major theme of the book, he is explaining to me (in interview) why neither his former work (in both its technical and philosophical aspects) nor the Soviet worldview contradict the teachings of Vissarion, the sect leader who, in 1991, proclaimed himself the Second Coming of Christ. Chevalkov, who considers Vissarion to have reconciled all of the world’s spiritual and intellectual currents, was an early and zealous convert, who quickly became the high priest of the sect upon relocating to their survivalist commune in southern Siberia, where my interviews were conducted.

The Page 99 Test, in this case, has succeeded admirably. The book’s analysis shifts regularly between the experience of individual converts, believers and radicals of the early 1990s, and a broad cultural and intellectual portrait of late-Soviet and post-collapse Russian society. Here on page 99, the reader finds the former, in appropriately colorful form. It is a book of eccentrics, oddballs and heretics in some ways, but one that finds such people to be far closer to the center of Soviet society and culture than one would assume—with Chevalkov an excellent example. His story addresses a central question of the text, namely, how and why so many people, possessed of Soviet values and Soviet resources, came to adopt novel and radical worldviews that most would consider un-Soviet, all in the few years surrounding the country’s collapse. With these questions answered—read to see how!—the book then draws a new and I hope compelling picture of Soviet life and its legacies in the new Russian Federation. But its largest conclusions don’t concern the Soviet Union alone. The reader ought to come away thinking about the relationship between science and faith; reckoning with the conditional and fragile nature of their own worldview; and considering how different Russia’s crisis in the 1990s really is from our own crisis today. Page 99 won’t get you there entirely, but it’s not a very long book on the whole.

Learn more about The Spirit of Socialism at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eve Darian-Smith's "Policing Higher Education"

Eve Darian-Smith is a distinguished professor and the chair of the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters, and shared the following:

Page 99 talks about how attacks on universities and scholars are related to a wider set of attacks on journalists, librarians, writers, political activists and public intellectuals – in fact anyone who challenges repressive political power. This wider set of attacks by antidemocratic regimes, including the MAGA Republican regime, may take various forms. In places such as Brazil, Hungary or India, they can range from censoring what gets published, to closing news outlets, to arrests, detentions, and in some cases even torture, rape and death.

The Page 99 Test is pretty effective in conveying the overarching point of my book, which is that attacks on academic freedom are one strategy exercised by antidemocratic politicians to expel any criticism challenging their authority to govern. We see attacks on academic freedom increasingly under Trump’s second administration as students and scholars are policed and criminalized for public protest, as well as shuttled into cars and relocated to distant detention centers. And we see it in the widespread defunding of science and research that seeks to make universities and colleges bend to the far-right’s ideological agenda. These efforts have a chilling effect on learning. In a very material sense, people are being disciplined to self-censor and not speak up, afraid of real and imminent threats. This is what the far-right wants – to create an environment in which people are scared to think in ways that may question those in power.

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a US problem. My book looks at two interconnected global trends – rising antidemocracy and declining academic freedom. I argue that what is happening in the US needs to be understood as part of a global drift toward authoritarianism that includes aggressive control over knowledge production.

With this book, I hope to open conversations about the value of academic freedom and higher education in general. Despite US education being very expensive and historically exclusive, going to college is vital for training people to question their assumptions and think critically about their place in the world. And importantly, academic freedom is central to revisioning more inclusive democratic societies that respect diverse worldviews and encourage innovative ideas that drive new jobs and solutions.

Being able to think, study, discuss and share knowledge without fear of censorship is essential for everyone, irrespective of age, gender, sex, religion, class, race or ethnicity. This is an urgent and timely message as we face a new era of unparalleled political repression.

Learn more about Policing Higher Education at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Global Burning.

--Marshal Zeringue

David C. Hoffman's "American Freethought"

David C. Hoffman is an associate professor in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at the City University of New York.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Freethought: The History of a Social Movement, 1794–1948, and reported the following:

Page 99 of American Freethought takes readers right to the heart of the book’s subject matter. It begins a section devoted to a freethinking feminist named Frances Wright who lived from 1795 to 1852. The section is titled, “Frances Wright: Utopian Abolitionist and Apostle of Science.” It opens,

Frances Wright was one of the most luminous of the British activists who immigrated to the United States in the early nineteenth century. She is honored today as a pioneering feminist and abolitionist who was the first woman to go on a public speaking tour in America, but she also should be remembered for carrying forward [Thomas] Paine’s vision for science by promoting secular scientific education for both women and men.

By way of background, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense set America on the path to independence, argued that science rather than traditional religion should be the common pursuit that unites a free republic. Wright promoted this idea in her public lectures, urging her followers to establish “Halls of Science,” where a free scientific education would be available to all regardless of gender or social standing.

I am glad to have the opportunity to introduce the readers of the Page 99 Test to Frances Wright, who was a major figure in the freethought, abolitionist, and feminist movements of the early nineteenth century that is all but forgotten today. In the 1820s she invented and pursued a workable scheme for ending slavery in the United States that might have changed the course of history if it had not been brought down by lack of funding and an outbreak of malaria. Wright’s collected works should have a place on the shelf of Penguin Classics next to her mentor Jeremy Bentham, but there is no modern edition of them in any series.

Wright is just one of the many freethinking women and men that readers will encounter on the pages of American Freethought. Among the others are Ernestine Rose, the atheistic daughter of a Polish rabbi who led efforts to establish married women’s property right in New York State; Frances Ellingwood Abbott, a radical Unitarian whose “Nine Demands of Liberalism” ignited the revival of American freethought after the civil war; Ida Craddock, a fervent spiritualist who was persecuted for writing a sex manual; and Queen Silver, a precocious child whose first public lecture in defense of atheism was given at the age of ten in the 1920s. These are some of the many characters in American history who have contributed to the freethought movement’s defense of every American’s right to believe or disbelieve by the light of their own conscience without state interference.

Learn more about American Freethought at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert N. Spengler III's "Nature's Greatest Success"

Robert N. Spengler III directs the Fruits of Eurasia: Domestication and Dispersal research project and leads the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is author of the book Fruit from the Sands and has published dozens of scholarly articles while running research projects across Central Asia.

Spengler applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity, with the following results:

The ninety ninth page of Nature’s Greatest Success is bisected by two different and equally captivating topics; the page opens with the conclusion of a discussion of strawberry domestication. The popular narrative of strawberry domestication involves a farmer in the 1700s – a bit of a strawberry fanatic – who planted different species of strawberries in his garden, only to notice one day that something rather different was growing in his strawberry patch. I ask whether the process of stumbling across hybrid forms of a crop can be thought of as a proxy for some aspects of domestication in prehistory. If an ancient farmer suddenly discovered a unique form of a crop growing in their field, would they have tried to reproduce it, and, if so, which of the forms of plants in your produce market are a result of this process? The latter part of the page dives into the odd case of quinoa domestication, and I rationalize the ways that the process could not have involved human intentionality. In short, genetic features of the plant prevent active seed selection from fostering the process of domestication.

I believe that a reader picking the book up and thumbing to the page in question would gather enough of an understanding of the overall book that, if the topic catches their attention, they will return to page one and begin reading. The book spans a wide range of topics, using many case studies, with the goal of providing the reader with an idea of what domestication looked like in antiquity and how the foods they eat came into being.

Domestication remains one of the most captivating topics of scholarship across the sciences, as it is a key part of the story of what permitted humanity to become culturally modern. Without domesticated crops, you would not have any of the material goods that you take for granted, human populations would be low, cities could not exist, and the arts and sciences would not have developed. Geneticists, archaeologists, and ecologists have started to realize that humans in prehistory did not intentionally domesticate crops. This means that the evolutionary process that permitted human cultural development was a happy accident, as opposed to a great achievement of humanity. In Nature’s Greatest Success, I explore these new ideas about how domestication traits first evolved. In this book, I encourage the reader to think in different ways about ancient agriculture and the ongoing domestication processes all around you today. In short, the most important questions about humanity have remained unanswered because of long-standing misunderstandings about how ancient domestication occurred, and the true story of domestication is far more interesting than the long-standing narrative.

Visit Robert N. Spengler III's website.

The Page 99 Test: Fruit from the Sands.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve L. Monroe's "Mirages of Reform"

Steve L. Monroe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is a scholar of development, with a primary focus on the Arab world. His scholarship examines two of the region's most pressing developmental challenges: limited economic integration, and gender inequality.

Monroe applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World, and shared the following:

Page 99 defends how this chapter in Mirages of Reform measures the strength of Jordanian industries’ social connections to the state. This measure relies on data from publicly traded firms. It gauges industries’ social-connections strength as the share of chairmen and board members (CBMs) of publicly traded firms in an industry who belong to Jordan’s historically favored ancestral group – Jordanians of East Bank descent.

The first half of page 99 presents the pros and cons of this measure. On the plus side, data from publicly traded firms is publicly available. This helps me identify socially connected CBMs based on whether they have an “East Bank” last name, and cull information on their firms’ size and profits. On the downside, this measure assumes that industries without publicly traded firms have weak social connections to the state.

The second half of page 99 tries to validate this assumption. Compared to industries with publicly traded firms, Jordanian industries without publicly traded firms have on average smaller firms, lower tariffs and are devoid of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) – all signs of weak social connections. I then argue that if industries without publicly traded firms did in fact have strong social connections to the state, this measure would be a “hard” test of the argument as it would overestimate the social connections strength of weakly connected industries; differences in tariff cuts and profits between industries with strong and weak social connections would be even greater if I had a more accurate measure of industries’ social connections. Page 99’s last paragraph presents qualitative evidence from different industries that substantiates the chapter’s measure of social-connections strength.

The Page 99 Test on Mirages of Reform passes in spirit but not in substance. Page 99 gives the browser a whiff of the book’s essence – its challenges, assumptions, methodological orientations. Defining and measuring social connections was one of the hardest parts of this book project. Page 99 exhibits one of the book’s tactics in measuring social connections. I like how the page begins by acknowledging this measure’s limitations, then segues into an empirical and theoretical defense of the measure, before validating the measure with secondary sources and case expertise. I hope that a browser reading page 99 would infer that I understand the empirical challenges of studying state – society relations, and have made a good faith effort to overcome these challenges.

Nevertheless, page 99 does not reveal the book’s argument: industries with stronger social connections undergo more extensive but deceptive levels of trade policy reform when their state has greater support from the US and the EU. The Page 99 Test also excises the previous chapters’ lengthy explanation and definition of social-connections strength. I conceptualize the strength of industrialists’ social connections to the state as a function of the quality and frequency of their interactions with state officials. By this logic, the economic elite who belong to politically favored social groups have the strongest social connections to their regime – hence page 99’s focus on CBMs of East Bank descent. This information is key to assessing the social connections measure’s validity.

Lastly, in shrinking Mirages of Reform’s measure of social connections to CBMs from politically favored groups, the Page 99 Test excludes the multiple approaches this book uses to assess social connections across time and place. Instead, the page 99 reader might mistakenly conclude that this book restricts its measures of social connections to what is static and quantifiable. For a more complete yet condensed understanding of Mirages of Reform, I encourage the casual browser to skim the introduction.

Visit Steve L. Monroe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marcus Alexander Gadson's "Sedition"

Marcus Alexander Gadson is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and the author of articles published in places such as the UCLA Law Review and the Georgetown Law Journal.

Gadson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sedition: How America's Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Sedition says:

…virulent white supremacy political campaign in American history to shatter the movement for interracial political cooperation. Meanwhile, Democrats in Wilmington conspired to overthrow a government they associated with Black political power, which culminated in an armed mob demanding the mayor’s resignation at gunpoint after a day of bloodletting. If both these efforts succeeded, white supremacists could end Black political involvement in the state and eradicate the spirit of 1868 once and for all.

Someone reading this would get an inkling of what my book is about, but miss important context and not truly understand the argument I make. They would know that they will eventually read a chapter explaining that white supremacy motivated some North Carolinians to overthrow Wilmington’s government and that their insurrection was violent. However, they would not know, just from the excerpt, that the book makes a larger claim: that constitutional crises have been common in American history and have shaped American constitutional law and history in dramatic ways. The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 is part of that larger story I tell.

Sedition provides six examples of constitutional crisis in American history, most of which readers will never have heard of, such as the Buckshot War, Dorr Rebellion, and Brooks-Baxter War. And by “constitutional crisis,” I mean things like terrorist organizations overthrowing duly elected governments and militias loyal to rival candidates shooting each other dead in the street. I then explain how these crises have affected the drafting and interpretation of both state and federal constitutions. At a time when many commentators are arguing about whether we are in a constitutional crisis, I believe this book can give readers vital context as they assess the debates.

Learn more about Sedition at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam S. Hayes's "Irrational Together"

Adam S. Hayes is professor of sociology at the University of Lucerne. Before entering academia, he worked as an options market maker and equity derivatives sales trader and was licensed as a financial advisor.

Hayes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Irrational Together: The Social Forces That Invisibly Shape Our Economic Behavior, with the following results:

Page 99 is the hinge where the book moves from storytelling to method. It really distills the broader mission of the book: to show that economic choices are never purely about numbers or cognitive quirks—they’re also greatly influenced by social forces. The passage invites readers to see how experimental techniques can unpick the ways that price, convenience, and status jostle with trust, loyalty, and shared identity in everyday financial decisions. It’s not about dismissing “economic” explanations or romanticizing the social. Instead, the page makes a case for measuring these factors in tandem. Unraveling the way that our dollars interact with our culture, social contexts, socialization processes, and relationships is indeed a miniature of the book’s central framework.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Absolutely. The entire argument of Irrational Together is that economic life is governed, in part, by social forces—and that we can measure these influences. Page 99 reveals how the book bridges disciplines, bringing sociology’s insights about things like norms, networks, and identity into conversations typically dominated by economic rationality or behavioral biases. It’s not a rejection of what's come before, but an insistence that to truly understand choice, we have to see how these perspectives mesh and rub up against each other. This page signals a book that’s more than just a critique of “rational economic man”; it’s a toolkit for better understanding how our choices get entangled with who we are, who we know, and what matters most to us.

If this page draws you in, the rest of Irrational Together offers an extended invitation to see economic life in high relief. From meme-stock booms to the hidden scripts of gendered money talk, from algorithmic investing to the moral boundaries of peer-to-peer transactions, the book uses familiar stories, original data, and lived experiences to explore how everything from culture and social identities to interpersonal ties and social networks shape even what we think of as our most private economic decisions. What emerges is a vision of economic life that is less about solitary individuals optimizing abstract curves or even hopelessly irrational beings with limited processing power & cognitive biases--and more about real people navigating the social landscape that is the economy. By the end, readers won’t just have a richer view of economic sociology; they’ll see how these insights can inform more reasonable efforts at navigating financial choices and the crafting of more effective policies. If page 99 made you curious about why you sometimes pay more to buy from a friend—or why an app can nudge you toward “rational” investing—you’ll find the rest of the book picks up that thread and runs with it.

Visit Adam S. Hayes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Neil Gregor's "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany"

Neil Gregor is professor of modern European history and director of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich, How to Read Hitler, and Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past. Most recently he coedited Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor.

Gregor applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book falls in a section entitled ‘Guidance, Direction, Censorship’, so takes us straight to the heart of what the book is about – namely the question of how the Nazi dictatorship impacted the work of German orchestras in the 1930s and 1940s. As one would only expect, the regime swiftly developed mechanisms to ensure that orchestras adjusted their repertoire to Nazi demands regarding the promotion of ‘healthy’ German music (whatever that was). Conversely, the regime’s antisemitism was such that the performance of ‘Jewish music’ was rigorously policed – composers such as Mahler or Mendelssohn disappeared from concert programmes very quickly. So in this sense the Page 99 Test works remarkably well!

At the same time, the passage nods to the ways in which the work of monitoring orchestral programming was carried out not by ‘the Nazi regime’ in the sense of something suspended over the musicians’ own world, but by figures co-opted from that musical world into the apparatus of control. In other words, it carries something of one of the core arguments of the book, namely that the remaking of German musical life under the dictatorship was a process in which musicians participated actively themselves. Over the course of the last twenty years historians of Nazi Germany have come to understand that the regime was not so much something that sat on top of German society as something that was embedded in it. This encourages us to think of musicians – and others – not merely as passive objects of the regime’s policies, but as agents in the formulation and implementation of those policies, and to recognise that the participatory dimensions of Nazi rule were in operation in the musical sphere too.

Where the test works slightly less well is in capturing the side of the book that is about audiences. As well as exploring how orchestras changed as institutions, the book is concerned with the question of whether new forms of listening to music emerged among the public. I am interested to explore not only how the transformation of ‘Germans’ into ‘Nazis’ over the 1930s and 1940s can be mapped in the concert hall, but also to think about how the concert hall was a site in which that transformation was pursued. In that way, the book moves beyond thinking about the world of policy and regulation into offering a social and cultural history of the phenomenon of concert-going more generally.

Learn more about The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Gabbott & Jan Zalasiewicz's "Discarded"

Sarah Gabbott is a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. She researches the fossil record of ancient life and is particularly interested in understanding how fossils form and what they reveal about evolution and ecology. She actively seeks new fossil specimens from across the globe, going on digs to China, South Africa and the Canadian Rockies. She also works in the laboratory analyzing fossils and undertaking grisly experiments to determine how decomposition affects fossilization. Recently, she has turned her attention to the potential fossil record created by human activity, especially thinking about how long our 'artefacts' will endure.

Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. He was formerly a field geologist and palaeontologist with the British Geological Survey, involved in the geological mapping of eastern England and central Wales. His interests include Early Palaeozoic fossils, notably the graptolites (a kind of extinct zooplankton), mud and mudrocks, the Quaternary Ice Ages, the nature of geological time, and the geology made by humans. In recent years he has helped develop the concept of an Anthropocene epoch. He has written many popular science articles and books.

Gabbott and Zalasiewicz applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book Discarded takes the reader, fair and square, into the kind of world – or rather worlds – that we as palaeontologists must navigate in our daily work. It casually spans three and a half billion years, as the story stretches out from the microbes that colonize our clothes today to the first microbes that began to grow on the seafloors of the early Earth. It crosses, too, from living world to the chemical one, as it considers which minerals might crystallize to turn this kind of interaction into tangible, durable fossils, whether of primordial microbial colonies or of our modern fashion items. And it’s also a page that takes us into the mechanisms that keep our planet habitable, in introducing the diatoms, oceanic microplankton that provide much of the oxygen that we breathe.

It's a fair sample, we think, of the story that we have to tell: of how our science of palaeontology can throw a new kind of light on many aspects both of our lives and of the workings of our planet, as we show how even our most fleeting of human fashions may become immortal, leaving fossil impressions in strata that can endure until the end of the Earth.

This single page, mind, gives only a tantalizing glimpse of the extraordinary novelty and diversity of technofossils: those objects that we create for our profit and pleasure, and that have durability built into them by human design as a very effective first step to future fossilization. You have to turn to other pages of our book to consider the palaeontological puzzles posed by objects that range from concrete- built megacities spanning thousands of square kilometres to the almost unbelievably minuscule patterns etched onto the microchip within your computer and mobile phone; and, to consider how this new kind of palaeontology is affected by such things as global warming, sea level rise, and the balance between war and peace.

It’s the whole narrative of the book that shows our motive for writing it: that the countless objects that we so casually discard won’t simply somehow go away, but will all too often persist as a challenging, polluting legacy for our and future human generations. As technofossils begin their long journey to geological posterity, looking at them through a palaeontologist’s eyes may help with the vexing problems that they pose today.

Learn more about Discarded at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Jan Zalasiewicz's The Earth After Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ross Benes's "1999"

Ross Benes is a journalist, market research analyst, and author. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. As an entertainment industry analyst, he’s regularly cited as an expert source by the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and Bloomberg. His books include Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold and Turned On: A Mind-Blowing Investigation into How Sex Has Shaped Our World.

Benes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times, with the following results:

The 99th page of 1999 covers how Vince McMahon spun untrue stories about WWE’s primary competitors. One passage states:

Because WWE bought out its competition, it owns their video libraries, which WWE uses for documentaries and series about the companies McMahon purchased. These videos can be a fun trip down memory lane with their fantastic archival footage and interviews with prominent sources. But there’s bias because WWE spins stories so it always appears superior.

Readers seeing this page would get a good sense of what that particular chapter is about. But they wouldn’t get a sense of how 90s low culture connects to our modern world. Later on in that chapter I tie WWE’s revisionism to insincere storytelling by current politicians and business leaders. One of those pages, combined with page 99, would provide a strong example of what the book is about. Because 1999 is a group of essays, no single page covers its multiple subjects. But out of the subjects covered in the book, pro wrestling is arguably influencing the world the most. In that regard, page 99 points readers in the right direction of connecting yesterday’s low culture to current events.

Visit Ross Benes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Mutnick's "No Race, No Country"

Deborah Mutnick is professor of English at Long Island University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright, and shared the following:

I love Ford Madox Ford’s theory of opening a book to page ninety-nine to find the quality of the whole revealed. Of course, I had no idea what would be on page 99 of my recently published book until I looked. Ford is right, at least about No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright, except that I have to start with the sentence on page 98, which continues onto 99: “As he recounts in Black Boy, he stayed up all night to read issues of the New Masses after his first visit to the John Reed Club in 1933 and woke up to write ‘I Have Seen Black Hands,’ expressing the core principle in interracial, working-class solidarity that would guide him throughout his life, even when he chafed against it.” I then cite this stanza from the poem:

I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers.
And some day—and it is only this which sustains me—
Some day there shall be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!

Then comes a section break with the subtitle, “The Marxist Threads of Wright’s Sociology,” in which I contest the idea that Wright appropriated the sociological perspective of the Chicago school of urban sociology, according to literary scholar Carla Cappetti, thus attesting to the “1930s dying movement” of US Communism (40). To the contrary, not only did sociology during the Cold War fall into line with US policy to equate communism with totalitarianism and fascism, a perspective Wright explored and ultimately rejected in his 1953 novel The Outsider, but also the resurgence of Marxist sociology in the 1960s countered that narrative with a critique that he would have shared. For Wright, who remained a Marxist for the rest of his life, the Chicago school of sociology offered useful tools of inquiry, but as was always the case with him, he approached them critically, taking what he needed to pursue his own quest for a more just, egalitarian world.

Learn more about No Race, No Country at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith Weisenfeld's "Black Religion in the Madhouse"

Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her books include New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, winner of the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions.

Weisenfeld applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Black Religion in the Madhouse describes the transition in the diagnostic categories for mental illness in early twentieth-century US psychiatry from mania and melancholy to dementia praecox and manic-depressive psychosis, the latter categories proposed by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. To illustrate the change, I present the case of Charles D., an African American laborer who was admitted to St. Elisabeths Hospital in Washington DC in 1905, diagnosed with acute insanity caused by “religious excitement,” discharged from the hospital and readmitted the same year. On readmission, he was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox. While the application of these diagnostic categories was not limited to African Americans, Charles’s case underscores the book’s argument about the prominence of “religious excitement” as a listed cause of insanity for African American patients in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and signals the incorporation of these ideas into the new disease categories, even as the language of “religious excitement” fades away.

On page 99 I write:

As white American psychiatrists embraced Kraepelin’s new disease category in the early twentieth century, they mobilized ideas about race and religion in diagnosing Black patients and used their clinical experiences to theorize more generally about race, religion, and mental illness in ways that linked discourses from the older diagnostic system to the new.

The Page 99 Test works well for my book as it describes a critical turning point in the history of race, religion, and American psychiatry with the adoption of Kraepelin’s system. I argue that, with the turn from long-standing ideas among white American psychiatrists about “racial traits” to a system they presented as more rigorously scientific, sedimented assumptions about Black people’s propensity for superstition and religious excess persisted. In fact, in the early twentieth-century studies white psychiatrists published exploring the incidence of dementia praecox among Black patients, they often highlighted “primitive” religious expression as a helpful diagnostic tool.

At the end of page 99, I note that Emil Kraepelin read work by white American psychiatrists on dementia praecox among African Americans and took their accounts of racialized mental instability as authoritative. While not a central part of the book’s argument, it points to the influence of white physicians’ ideas about African American religion and mental normalcy in psychiatric circles.

Visit Judith Weisenfeld's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jordan Thomas's "When It All Burns"

Jordan Thomas is an anthropologist and former Los Padres hotshot wildland firefighter. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, and The Drift. Thomas is a Marshall Scholar with graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge and Durham University. He is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California.

Thomas applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, with the following results:

From page 99:

“And so we waited, hoping for an initial attack. An initial attack, or IA, is the zenith of fire suppression operations, allowing us to be the first crew on the fire’s edge. “That’s what hotshot’s live for,” Scheer told me.

Then, just when an initial attack seemed a distant dream, when the routine of running and practicing and pranking had softened my nerves, and when it seemed inevitable that we would sulk home as faux heroes— just then, we heard a noise. It started in a high pitch before dropping in frequency, zapping us all like an electric shock coming from the radio in Aoki’s truck. A voice followed the sound, announcing a lighting fire in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. Within thirty seconds, we were gone.

* ** *

The American West is full of pyrophiles, or fire lovers— species of plants, animals, and fungi whose existence depends upon their ability to follow ignitions. Of these species, the fire beetle is perhaps the most tenacious. These beetles are black, the size of a fingernail, and are equipped with heat receptors the width of a human hair. Their receptors hold liquid that expands when absorbing radiant heat, allowing the beetles to detect flames from over one hundred miles away. Wildfires act like magnets, pulling the beetles in swarms of millions, where they mate amid the flames, waxy bellies dispelling heat as they bore into charred wood to lay their eggs. In California in the 1940s, football games were occasionally disrupted when the collective embers of spectators’ cigarettes attracted beetles that, finding—"

If readers open to page 99, they’ll get a strong sense of the book’s overall approach. I move between close-up scenes of life on a hotshot crew—its rhythms, language, tensions, and jokes—and wider reflections on fire as an ecological and political force. That pairing is at the heart of the book: the human experience of wildfire nested inside the broader systems that create and respond to it. And I like to slip in cool facts and details—like fire beetles drawn to flames from over a hundred miles away. This, of course, is a metaphor for what we were doing as wildland firefighters who had traveled some 800 miles to be present in the Southwest when the monsoons brought lightning fires. The difference was, we followed the cycle of fire in order to break it.

As the fire season progresses and the fires grow more dangerous and difficult, the interplay between lived experience and broader context deepens. The book sinks into the historical forces and power structures that have made 21st-century fire so violent—centuries of suppression policy, colonial land management, and extractive economic systems. At the same time, I keep the story grounded in my crew and our lives on the fireline, where humor, banter, and friendship coexist with exhaustion, stress, and absurdity. That balance is the rhythm of the book, just as it was the rhythm of the fire season.

Learn more about When It All Burns at the Riverhead Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Kalaugher's "The Elephant in the Room"

Liz Kalaugher is a science journalist and the coauthor of Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life. Her writing has appeared in BBC Focus magazine, the Guardian, New Scientist, and Physics World, among other outlets. She lives in Bristol, UK.

Kalaugher applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Elephant in the Room: How to Stop Making Ourselves and Other Animals Sick, and shared the following:

From page 99:

‘People take their dogs out and think it’s funny that they chase prairie dogs,’ says Fraser. ‘That may be entertaining but your dog may come home with a plague-infested flea. Why take that chance?’

It’s by chance, too, that Kimberly Fraser of the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center’s words fall on page 99 of The Elephant in the Room: How to Stop Making Ourselves and Other Animals Sick. They’re deep in the chapter about black-footed ferrets, which feed on prairie dogs and have been plagued - if you’ll excuse the pun - by not one but two diseases. So much so that these animals only survive thanks to a lucky find by a Wyoming farmer’s dog.

For this book I’d rate the Page 99 Test at six out of ten. As it’s near the end of a chapter, page 99 reveals ways people are counteracting some of our earlier damage to ferret health: by feeding prairie dogs peanut butter laced with plague vaccine, and releasing captive-bred ferrets into the wild. Almost every chapter finishes with solutions for the species it covers; the final chapter examines strategies for safeguarding the health of all animals, including ourselves. Also typical is the inclusion of interviews with experts, who tell us why they work with wildlife and what it’s like to be out in the field.

Because it’s focused on solutions, page 99 spends less time than other pages describing a wild animal and its habits, habitat and challenges, as well as less time detailing how humans inadvertently harmed that animal’s health. For the black-footed ferret, this harm began in the early 20th century when we transported the bacteria that cause plague to North America via a flea-infested rat onboard a ship from Hong Kong. Other chapters look at other ways that humans have exacerbated disease - farming, habitat loss, trade and climate change.

What’s more, the chapter around page 99 concerns a mammal whereas some of the others cover birds, frogs and, briefly, shellfish. When it comes to setting, page 99 is based in North America, whilst other stories trot the globe from Antarctica to the Arctic via Australia, South America, Europe and Asia.

In essence, page 99 gives a flavour of the book but not the whole taste.

Visit Liz Kalaugher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bonnie Yochelson's "Too Good to Get Married"

Bonnie Yochelson is a former Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York and an established historian of New York City’s photographic history. Her notable works include Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, Alfred Stieglitz New York, and Berenice Abbott: Changing New York.

Yochelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen, and reported the following:

The top half of page 99 shows an 1893 self-portrait of Alice Austen. The caption reads, “When Alice left for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago – the farthest she had been from home – she took a self-portrait with Punch [her dog].” The bottom half of the page describes the photographs she took at the Exposition, two of which are shown on page 100.

The Page 99 Test works very well for this book! The page features one of Austen’s many carefully considered self-portraits, and it demonstrates the key features of the book’s design: illustrations were placed in close relation to the relevant text, yet the descriptive captions allow the reader to follow the story independent of the text. The quality of the paper and the printing, which were subsidized, is also apparent.

As it happens, this photograph marks a major turning point in Austen’s life. The first full sentence on the page suggests as much: “The purposeful young woman in the smart traveling suit is a far cry from the feminine charmer in lace decollete and elbow length gloves of the previous summer.” In the 1880s, Austen was a social butterfly, playing tennis, and going swimming and boating, with a full social calendar of dances, concert, dinners and balls, both at home and on vacation. What she called “the larky life” was the primary subject of her photographs. As she and her friends approached 25 in 1890, the pleasure of these social rituals gave way to the expectation of marriage and children, a rocky road for most of them. At this point, Austen briefly took up the idea of professional photography, which she first attempted at the Chicago Exposition.

Visit Bonnie Yochelson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling's "The Ghost Lab"

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Associated Press, and elsewhere. His books include A Libertarian Walks into a Bear and If It Sounds Like a Quack....

Hongoltz-Hetling applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Ghost Lab opens with a discussion of the Betty and Barney Hill Case, one of the most famous alien abduction reports in American history. The top of the page includes some of the evidence that supported the Hills' claims"

There were also several tantalizingly physical pieces of evidence: circular shiny spots on the back of their car that caused a compass needle to go haywire; a pink powder and rips on Betty’s dress; scuffs on the top of Barney’s shoes, allegedly caused when he was dragged up the ramp of the spacecraft; and a star map that Betty drew from memory that bore a resemblance to an actual star system about which she had no knowledge.

But then I transition to some of the reasons that skeptics point to not believe the Hills encountered aliens, after which I summarize the little-known path the couple took after their famous encounter:

Betty came to believe that she could send mental messages to the aliens, and encourage them to pilot their craft to a specific location. A network of legitimate scientists and UFO enthusiasts formed around the Hills. They spent several nights at Betty’s family farm in Kingston, to see if aliens that Betty had invited would show up. They never did.

I then transition to a sympathetically-described scene about Barney's death at their New England home.

The Page 99 Test does shed some light on what readers who pick up The Ghost Lab can expect -- the book is chock full of weird and colorful tales of the paranormal told from an objective viewpoint that is respectful and sympathetic of the "experiencer," but doesn't shy from information that contradicts the veracity of their outlandish claims.

But the test would also lead a browser to walk away with some misunderstandings about the book. I have to admit that the prose on this particular page is fairly straightforward and businesslike; but the book as a whole is suffused with humor and a more dramatic writing style. It also gives the impression that the book is primarily some sort of history, when in reality it's a modern tale about a group of ghost hunters, psychics and alien abductees, presented with historical and cultural context.

I hope that The Ghost Lab will appeal to believers and skeptics alike; the main characters come together with a shared, noble quest to inject science into the paranormal fields that they've become so interested in. They spend 9 years having all sorts of fun and bizarre misadventures, including an undercover mission to liberate the ghosts being held in a former insane asylum, communicating with aliens aboard a UFO, and a hunt for Bigfoot on the forested mountains of New Hampshire.The characters are colorful and relatable, right up until the moment that they do something too strange to be believed. While I've better appreciated the value of the Page 99 Test on my first two books, this one fell a bit flat, suggesting a more sedate journey than the actual ride, which is wild.

Visit Matt Hongoltz-Hetling's website.

The Page 99 Test: If It Sounds Like a Quack....

--Marshal Zeringue

Aviva Briefel's "Ghosts and Things"

Aviva Briefel is Edward Little Professor of the English Language and Literature and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Deceivers and The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination.

Briefel applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, with the following results:

I was relieved to find that page 99 captures the book as a whole: it introduces the concept of “exposure,” which I argue was essential to the cultures of Victorian spiritualism and skepticism. (Understandably, I had been somewhat nervous that my book itself would be exposed as failing the Page 99 Test.) One of the recurring themes of Ghosts and Things describes the complex interactions that occurred between those who adamantly believed that material objects could be used to communicate with ghosts during séances and those who were ready to expose spiritualists as frauds.

Page 99 initiates a discussion of how the concept of exposure was applied to the Davenport Brothers, American spiritualists who claimed to be able to interact with spirits by using a wooden cabinet. During their public séances, the brothers sat in the cabinet, which also contained a selection of musical instruments, and asked audience members to tie them with ropes and shut the doors. Spectators would witness spirit manifestations emanating from the closed cabinet, including musical instruments playing and spectral hands reaching out of the cabinet’s aperture. After a while, the doors to the cabinet swung open and the brothers could be seen, freed from their ropes, allegedly through the intervention of spirits. These feats led the Davenports to become renowned mediums in the United States and Britain. On page 99, I preview the various types of exposure that would befall the brothers a few months after journeying to England in 1865, both through the destruction of their cabinet during performances in Liverpool, Huddersfield, and Leeds, and through the appropriation of their trick by “anti-spiritualist” magicians who used their own versions of the cabinet to discredit the brothers.

Both of these strategies for exposing the Davenport Brothers reveal the tenuousness of the term “exposure” itself. When an angry audience rushed the stage and destroyed the cabinet on February 15, 1865, at St. George’s Hall in Liverpool, they did not find any hidden mechanisms or tricks. And yet, newspaper headlines announced the “Defeat and Exposure of the Davenport Brothers,” raising the question of what exposure without proof of fraud might mean. Given that the Davenports’ humiliation emphasized the breaking of the cabinet, does the term take on other meanings, such as an “exposure” to the elements? Or does it represent a loss of value through an unpackaging, not dissimilar to what happens now to action figures or dolls when taken out of their original containers? Likewise, the repetition of the Davenports’ acts by anti-Spiritualists such as Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and John Nevil Maskelyne also signal the instability of the idea of exposure. The replication of cabinets on stages throughout Europe and the United States blurred the line between homage and parody, as well as between the role of skeptics and believers in spiritualism, one of the main claims of my book.

In the rest of the chapter, I discuss the ways in which the Davenports themselves might have eventually been subject to yet another form of exposure. I contend that it is possible they borrowed their act from Henry Box Brown, who famously escaped from enslavement in March 1849 by arranging to have himself shipped in a wooden container from Richmond to Philadelphia. He subsequently went on to reenact this feat in front of audiences, including in England, when in May 1851, he traveled in his original box by from Bradford to Leeds, to the acclaim of large audiences. He later undertook his own anti-Spiritualist performances, seeking to expose the Davenport Brothers, which I argue might point to another meaning of exposure, this time of the brothers’ secretive adoption of a “gimmick” that Brown himself had devised. The dizzying significations of the term “exposure” are one example of the ways in which spiritualism offered new terminologies for grasping the visible and invisible worlds of Victorian culture.

Learn more about Ghosts and Things at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue