Rivka Weinberg's "The Meaning of It All"

Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of The Risk of A Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May Be Permissible. Weinberg specializes in ethical and metaphysical issues regarding procreation, birth, death, and meaning.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time, and reported the following:

In a book as ambitious as The Meaning of it All, which is a book that explains what Ultimate Meaning is (it's the point of leading a life at all), what Everyday Meaning is (it's the meaning in our everyday lives), what Cosmic Meaning is (it's the meaning of our role in the cosmos) and how death and time relate to meaning (death much less than has been claimed, time much more than has been noted), page 99 turns out to be a page on which a narrow point is made. It is therefore not the best sample page if you are looking for a page that gives you a good idea of the book, since this book addresses big, broad, deep, and important matters. But page 99 will suffice to demonstrate that the claims made in the book are well argued, with specific premises that lead to their conclusions, and that even the narrower points are of interest.

Page 99 of The Meaning of It All addresses the view that significance – how much something matters – is only relative to other things. On this view, our cosmic significance would be greater if we were the only intelligent beings in the universe and lesser if we weren't since significance is relative: "the broken knuckle on your finger is insignificant when you've also been shot in the face" (that's from page 98). So we should hope that we are the only intelligent beings in the cosmos because that would make us more cosmically significant.

I dispute this on page 99:

This perspective neglects intrinsic significance, which does not depend on how many things there are that can be considered similar to you. Although there are billions of people in the world, Kahane is wrong to conclude that we are each, therefore, “terrestrially insignificant” because significance— how much something matters— has both an intrinsic and a relative component. There’s no shortage of people in the world, “plenty of fish in the sea,” yet each person matters. Each person, like Walt Whitman, “contain[s] multitudes”; each person, a world, because each person has unique, untransferable, unfungible, and intrinsic value. You can’t kill a person and claim you did something insignificant because there are billions of other people. There is an intrinsic kind of significance, just as there is an intrinsic kind of value because how much something matters cannot be divorced from its value. Generally, the more valuable something is, the more significant it is: the more it matters if you lose it, destroy it, ignore it, create it, nurture it, etc. Intrinsic significance doesn’t disappear no matter how widely you pan out— even as far out as the entire cosmos—because it is inherent in the thing itself. Therefore, since we are intrinsically significant, we are significant wherever you find us. In this way, we have cosmic significance because we are significant in and of ourselves, and therefore significant anywhere, including the cosmos within which we reside. Does this make our lives more Cosmically Meaningful? I don’t think so because it doesn’t change how significant we are. It just reflects a fact about where that significance is located: in the cosmos.
[footnotes omitted]

This discussion tells us that even though we are intrinsically cosmically significant, that doesn't add a lot of meaning to our lives because it doesn't seem very different from our earthly significance, so what does it add, really?

And this challenge runs throughout the book's chapter on Cosmic Meaning. If we assume all the miracles in the world, what kind of meaning would that give us? How meaningful would it be to commune with god in the afterlife or enjoy heavenly bliss? Probably not very meaningful because, think about it: heavenly bliss sounds more like a drug trip than a meaningful experience, and communing with god probably gets old too. Why? How? Well, for that, you'll have to read the other 176 pages.

Visit Rivka Weinberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacques Berlinerblau's "Can We Laugh at That?"

Jacques Berlinerblau, Rabbi Harold White Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, is author of The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography and How to Be Secular. His writing appears in The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

Berlinerblau applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age, with the following results:

If you opened to page 99–first of all, thank you, I really appreciate your interest–you’d be in the thick of a discussion about the French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala. What a fascinating and unsettling character he is! For more than two decades running he has been making jokes about Jews and the Holocaust. Page 99 reviews some of that material.

Page 99 would give you some indication of what this book is about, namely jokes that set the world on fire. But it would not really give you a sense of the scope, depth, and dare I say, majesty, of the arguments contained within We Can’t Laugh at That: Comedy in Conflicted Age. Sorry Ford Madox Ford (OMG is that really his name?) but your test just kinda sux. What my 99th page doesn’t reveal is the word-and-thought-defying complexity of the free speech tensions that comedy ignites in the digital age. FMF, my thesis is that some tectonic shift is taking place in the domain of free speech and for whatever reasons comedy calls attention to that shift (and exacerbates all of its attendant tensions).

This is a book about how jokes lead to outrage, cancellation, deportation, mass violence and even geopolitical conflict. Whether it’s Dave Chappelle lighting up the trans community, Vir Das denouncing India’s ruling BJP party, or Zimbabwean comedian Samantha Kureya mocking the brutality of her government, the responses to such quips are fast, digital and furious. They also raise some really difficult questions about free speech and how much of it we can allow in a digitally interconnected world where some people don’t “get” the joke

Visit Jacques Berlinerblau's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Kate Nelson's "The Westerners"

Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian now based in Boston, Massachusetts. She has written about US western history, the Civil War, and American culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, Time, and Smithsonian Magazine. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone; The Three-Cornered War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Ruin Nation; and Trembling Earth.

Nelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier puts readers on the ground in Santa Fe in the chaotic winter of 1846-47. The U.S. Army had arrived in this trading center in northern Mexico a few months before, and General Stephen Watts Kearny had issued a proclamation annexing the territory of Nuevo México on behalf of the U.S. government. Kearny’s Army of the West was a component in the American invasion of Mexico, and the events I describe on page 99 reveal that Nuevomexicanos did not passively accept the U.S. Army’s occupation.

On page 99, in December 1846, one of The Westerners’ protagonists—a Mexican citizen named María Gertrudis Barceló—hears rumors that an uprising against the U.S. Army will take place on Christmas night. The revolt will begin in the town of Taos, seventy miles north of Santa Fe. Barceló, who is the wealthiest woman in Nuevo México, had already made her choice in the conflict with the United States. A keen observer of geopolitics, she had welcomed General Kearny and his officers to her home and her gambling saloon when they arrived. In mid-December, Barceló passes along the information about the uprising to the Army’s officials, and they make arrests.

New Mexico’s newly appointed American governor, the fur trader and entrepreneur Charles Bent, believes that these arrests mean that the revolt is over before it even started. Despite warnings that Taos residents resent Bent’s presumptive authority over them, Bent travels there to see his wife and children early in the new year. On January 19, 1847, rebels surround his house, and Bent goes out on the porch to try to talk them down while Ignacia and the children seek safety next door.

Browsers will have to turn the page to find out what happens next.

***
Anyone who opens The Westerners to page 99 and starts reading there would likely be confused. Because the book is a narrative history, they will be immersed in these scenes immediately, without much context or argumentative signposting to guide them. Sort of like dropping into a novel mid-chapter.

However, this page does exemplify my approach to U.S. western history throughout the entire book. I put readers on the ground with the book’s protagonists and give them a way to see and understand events they thought they knew well (like the Mexican-American War) from a vantage point that is likely new to them.

Just by reading page 99 of The Westerners, they will understand that this American war of conquest was contested, despite the U.S. Army reports that suggest the contrary.

They will understand this moment as a struggle for control over Santa Fe, a city whose position at the intersection of the Santa Fe Trail to the east and the Chihuahua Trail to the south made it a vital center of economic and political power in the American West in the 1840s.

And given that this page is part of a larger chapter that focuses on Gertrudis Barceló’s experience of the invasion and occupation of her city, they will get a sense of the important role she played as a cultural broker during a volatile and violent time in Santa Fe’s history.

This is one of the themes of the book: Westerners in the nineteenth century tended to be adaptable, and they used their extensive community networks to survive and often thrive during a volatile time in American history.

Visit Megan Kate Nelson's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Three-Cornered War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charlotte Brooks's "The Moys of New York and Shanghai"

Charlotte Brooks is a historian and author who has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American and Chinese diaspora history. Originally from California, she graduated from Yale and worked in mainland China and Hong Kong before earning a PhD from Northwestern University. She is a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a proud New Yorker.

Brooks applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution describes the lives of the two New York-based Moy siblings, Kay and Helen, during the mid-Depression years. Kay was married to Ming Tai Chin, whose Jazz Age restaurant empire had collapsed in 1932, so the Chins were suddenly struggling to support their seven children. Helen, her husband George, and their young daughter were more fortunate, yet the stress of George’s job as the only Chinese American civil engineer at a white firm was beginning to show.

The Page 99 Test does not really offer a full sense of the book. The Moys of New York and Shanghai is a biography of the six Moy siblings and their spouses, but I center three of the couples—Kay and Ming Tai, Ernest Moy and his wife Ruth Koesun Moy, and Alice Moy Lee and her husband Alfred Lee—and tell most of the story through them. So looking at page 99 gives a reader perhaps a one-third view, mainly of the domestic lives and career struggles of the New York-based siblings. The war and revolution of the title more directly shaped the lives of the other two featured couples, who spent much of this period in China.

What I hope readers see on every page are people who are familiar and relatable. Of course, the Moys’ lives in many ways were extraordinary—family members included a revolutionary, an Axis broadcaster, a wartime Rosie the Riveter, an engineer who helped put the first man on the moon, and two Medal of Freedom winners—yet all of the siblings and their spouses were complex, flawed, and deeply human.

Follow Charlotte Brooks on Instagram.

The Page 99 Test: Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eli Hirsch's "Selves in Doubt"

Eli Hirsch is Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. He has published widely on metaphysics and epistemology. His books include Quantifier Variance and Realism, Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt, and Talmudic Philosophies.

Hirsch applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Selves in Doubt, with the following results:

On page 99 of my book, I argue that intuitively strange languages that are often criticized on pragmatic or theoretical grounds as being in some sense “bad,” ought rather to be criticized as “impossible,” that is, impossible as a primary language in terms of which people think. An example is a language containing the words “cubond” and “rindical” that refer, respectively, to anything that is either cubical or round and anything that is either round or cylindrical. I say on page 99:

It seems to me that insofar as I can get myself to accept the possibility of people actually thinking in terms of [such a language], I have no definite intuitive feeling that there is anything bad about this. If they are cognitively disposed to think, ‘A cubound object must have twelve edges if it is not rindical,” which is a true statement about cubes, what is bad about that?

I’m afraid the Page 99 Test does not work for my book. That page is in a chapter that is largely ancillary to the main topics in the book. The book is primarily about selves, first, about first-person (“de se”) attitudes towards oneself and then, about knowledge of other selves. A main conclusion of the first part is that a language suitable for rational beings must contain the first-person pronoun. Chapter 4, containing page 99, is essentially a kind of postscript to that main conclusion, arguing against more familiar claims in the literature about rational constraints on languages that have nothing to do with the first-person pronoun.

As I just noted, the first part of the book is about first-person attitudes, and the later part is about knowledge of other selves. In the later part, chapter 6 has been found by readers to be especially provocative. I argue in this chapter that it is a priori metaphysically impossible to be “sane” – to be a “genuine self” – if one is not certain of the existence of other selves. This claim becomes even more provocative and perplexing when I argue in the following chapter in favor of traditional skeptical arguments that raise doubts about the existence of other selves. How all of this can coherently work together is something I try to explain in the final chapter.

Learn more about Selves in Doubt at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Atilla Hallsby's "Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie"

Atilla Hallsby is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power.

Hallsby applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in US Political Rhetoric, and shared the following:

On page 99 of Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie, readers will find a discussion of the secret scandal focused on the case of Valerie Plame Wilson, whose secret identity was exposed during (and by) the George W. Bush administration. The case is broken up chronologically and organized according to three rhetorical tropes: repetition, caesura, and synecdoche. Page 99 is the end of the section on caesura and the start of the section on synecdoche.

Caesura is a trope of missingness, hiddenness, or absence. Valerie Plame Wilson, a former CIA agent whose identity was leaked by members of the Bush administration, embodies the caesura because, in her congressional testimony before a 2007 House Oversight and Reform Committee, she describes herself “as a lost node in a life-giving, life-taking network of spies and technicians.” The significance of her status as caesura is that she signaled an emerging “absence of separation between America's national security state and its private, political interests.”

Synecdoche is a trope of substitution, specifically, the substitution of one ‘whole’ of reality for another. The focus of this section is George W. Bush’s folksy, but also error-riddled, speech. “During the 2000 election, Bush’s campaign marketed him as a likable, trustworthy, and down-to-earth candidate: a straight shooter who couldn’t mislead the public, because he tripped over his words and couldn’t help but say what he meant. Following several years of the war on terror, perceptions of Bush began to change, even among Republican loyalists.” Speech was the part around which perceptions of Bush's whole presidency were rearranged, substituting his folksy image with that of deliberately opaque war monger.

Like synecdoche, page 99 is a part that frames the book’s whole in a partial -- albeit useful -- way. It is partial because the Plame scandal is only one example among many that illustrate how political rhetoric in the United States has become supersaturated with the secret’s routine, recurring forms. It is useful because it clearly centers rhetoric through the language of trope and because the page resonates with events that are fresh in U.S. public memory as of February-March 2026. Readers may find “the absence of separation between America's national security state and its private, political interests” timely, to say nothing of the refashioning of the president’s image around signifiers that have been twisted and reconfigured by the prurient ambitions of American imperialists and the incumbent U.S. president.

Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie tells two stories. The first, told in chapters 1-2, concerns the epistemic, historical, and rhetorical precedents for the secret’s prolonged crises. The second story, told in chapters 3-6, features the scandal, dog whistle, leaker, and detective. Beyond the reference to John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, these chapters lend the title a performative twist: The scandal is associated with sovereign power, the settler with popular detective fiction, the leaker with the sexualization of national security state vulnerabilities, and the lie with the racist dogwhistle. Beginning with George W. Bush and ending with Joseph R. Biden, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie is prelude to a political present in which ‘the people’ are constantly reminded of what they do not – or cannot – know.

Visit Atilla Hallsby's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Engel's "American Kindergarten"

Susan Engel is the Class of 1959 Director of the Program in Teaching and a senior lecturer in psychology at Williams College. She is the author of The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood, and The Intellectual Lives of Children.

Engel applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, American Kindergarten: Dispatches from the First Year of School, and reported the following:

Page 99 plants you right in the middle of one particular classroom in Tennessee. A little girl named Destiny is struggling to figure out what she is supposed to do, and she is struggling to follow the rules. She is a haunting little girl, in a somewhat haunting situation. By the end of the page, there’s a glimmer of hope for her.

More broadly I think page 99 offers a feel for what it’s like to read the whole book, which tells the story of specific students and their teachers, figuring things out together in their classrooms.The passage about Destiny gives you a good sense of how the book is put together, and what the book is about: stories about five year olds, their teachers, and the schools in which they all spend their days. However, that particular description is heart wrenching. Many other parts of the book are uplifting, funny, or simply offer you a close-up look at the world of kindergarten. Some sections of the book describe developmental research that challenges what teachers are doing.

I embarked on this project with what felt to me like an urgent question: after 45 years of developmental research, teaching children, working with teachers, writing about schools, and as a mother and grandmother, what would I think if I travelled around the country and took stock of our schools? What would I find that was the same everywhere, and what kinds of differences would I see? I had a hunch that the popular narratives about how terrible our education system were wrong, and was equally dissatisfied with the too-granular view of schools one gets from reading education research. I needed to see for myself. I’m so glad I stuck with it. I learned more from this project than almost any other research I’ve undertaken. I discovered what really seems to make the difference between classrooms where children flourish and classrooms where kids and teachers seem to be dragging their way through the day, and it wasn’t what I expected. The visits gave me a chance to see where developmental science shines a light on what is happening, and where we have allowed the research and our school practices to rumble along on totally separate tracks. Page 99 hints at all of that, so I guess the test is pretty good.

Learn more about American Kindergarten at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Japonica Brown-Saracino's "The Death and Life of Gentrification"

Japonica Brown-Saracino is a regular commentator for major news organizations such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, and is the award-winning author of A Neighborhood that Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity and How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities. She is professor of sociology and women’s, gender, and sexualities studies at Boston University, where she serves as faculty fellow at the Initiative on Cities.

Brown-Saracino applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea, with the following results:

Talk of gentrification abounds. References to gentrification appear in television series, social media posts, novels, and art. But the word doesn’t just evoke brick-and-mortar gentrification anymore. People reference the “gentrification” of donuts, collard greens, and even our own selves. Gentrification is a tool many rely on to signal transformations far afield from urban redevelopment, particularly those associated with appropriation and diminishing community and “authenticity.” Above all else, gentrification communicates loss.

But even as gentrification works to mark and mourn certain transformations, it doesn’t always help us speak directly about them. Sometimes, relying on gentrification as a shorthand prevents us from directly addressing precisely that which we hope the term gestures to, serving as a faulty metonym for what really troubles us. This can be true even when one hopes that engagement with gentrification will generate resistance to urban upscaling. This dissonance emerges, in part, from the fact that gentrification evokes such general feelings of loss that it can gesture to issues well beyond brick-and-mortar gentrification.

Like much of The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea, page 99 explores what gentrification means and how it works for what the sociologist Wendy Griswold calls “cultural producers.” While much of the book examines novels, newspaper articles, academic texts, and activists’ narratives, page 99 departs from that trend by featuring the work of an artist. In addition, page 99 is distinctive in its attention to a work that aims to evoke brick-and-mortar gentrification, while also using the process a metonym for a broader set of losses. This stands in contrast to those who rely on gentrification purely as a metaphor, such as when we quip about the gentrification of tattoos or beer.

Specifically, page 99 engages an incredibly evocative sculpture, made by the artist Pat Falco, which the artist displayed in Boston’s upscale Seaport neighborhood in 2019. The sculpture, entitled Mock, was presented as a mockup of Boston’s most iconic housing form: the triple decker. Throughout the 20th century, the triple decker provided affordable housing for many working-class Bostonians; the form is particularly associated with White immigrant and ethnic populations. In the triple decker that Mock presents, colorful wallpaper dominates the walls, with frames around statements such as, “here lies the body of democratic architecture,” “a nod to our colonial future,” and “the illusion of a single family home.” Another image depicts a photo of clothes on the line behind a triple decker. Mock’s warm and cozy interior stands in stark contrast to neaby steel and glass towers.

Via Mock, Falco meant to contrast the humble triple decker with the Seaport’s luxury housing. Mock asks why recent development so often serves the wealthy, and why we’ve let working class housing disappear. Mock is meant to offer criticaon brick-and-mortar gentrification.

However, I ask readers to consider the messages we unintentionally communicate when we evoke gentrification. Mock is no exception. It communicates feeling, including connection to home, place, and family – and the fragility of that connection. More than anything, it communicates loss. However, by situating Mock in a triple-decker that harkens to the first part of the 20th century, before gentrification ascended, it conjures nostalgia for neighborhood groups that dispersed in the mid-20th century, before brick-and-mortar gentrification took root. Many of those who once assembled in the rooms Mock presents left Boston due to suburbanization, White flight, and upward mobility. While Falco aims to underline the consequences of gentrification for today’s working-class Bostonians, most of whom are demographically distinct from those who populated triple-deckers in the period Mock commemorates, by gesturing to the distant past, he evokes nostalgia for a Boston that changed before literal gentrification. In this sense, Mock gestures to the loss of community, but the sculpture references a time when many experienced losses because of mobility, rather than gentrification.

Page 99 instructs that sometimes, even when we aim to talk about brick-and-mortagentrification, we end up gesturing to other issues. This is, in part, because gentrification has come to evoke more feeling than action. Today, gentrification is so evocative of loss that it conjures a general loss, rather than loss specific to gentrification. My book calls for critical reflection on what we really evoke when we call on gentrification as a symbol.

Learn more about The Death and Life of Gentrification at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes.

The Page 99 Test: How Places Make Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Igler' "All Species of Knowledge"

David Igler is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (2013), which won the Sally and Ken Owens Award of the Western History Association and the John Lyman Book Award for U.S. Maritime History of the North American Society for Oceanic History, and Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920.

Igler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, All Species of Knowledge: A Voyage of Discovery, Failure, and Natural History in the Pacific Ocean, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test works exceedingly well for my new book All Species of Knowledge. The page examines a lithograph by the voyage artist Ludwig Choris and also the way the expedition’s personnel served a strong critique of the Russian imperial project in the North Pacific. The Rurik expedition sought to find a Northwest Passage in the years 1815-1818, but it failed in this mission in the same manner as every previous attempt to locate a passage. The voyage naturalists and the artist turned failure into great success with their own production of natural history and visual ethnography once they returned to Europe. Much of the scientific knowledge they gather derived from their interactions and communications with Indigenous people.

The artist Choris was central to this success, and his volume of lithographs Voyage Pittoresque (1822) created an entirely new genre of visual expeditionary accounts. Page 99 delves into one of these lithographs: an image of a richly decorated visor used by an Aleut sea otter hunter. These decorations show how Aleut hunters encircled their prey on the water, and used spears to attack an individual otter. Surrounding this image of the hunt are depictions of whales and other sea life. Therefore, the Aleut visor itself tells a story of the hunt, and Choris’s lithograph translates this story for his European audience.

Page 99 connects this ethnographic interpretation of the visor to a larger goal of the Rurik’s naturalists. They sought to acquire knowledge from Indigenous groups because they found this knowledge valuable. At the same time, they were largely repulsed by the Russian colonial project in the North Pacific, which had severely destabilized Aleut and other Indigenous communities in the previous decades. Their private diaries and published accounts document their critique of the Russians, despite the fact they sailed on a Russian ship. Page 99 oddly, even eerily, reflects the book in that it showcases the most important archival material (a telling lithograph by the artist) and one of the key arguments regarding discovery, failure, and the ongoing work of colonialism in the Pacific world.

Learn more about All Species of Knowledge at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Great Ocean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Avery Sutton's "Chosen Land"

Matthew Avery Sutton is the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor and department chair in history at Washington State University. He is the author of several books on the history of American Christianity, including Double Crossed and American Apocalypse, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Pullman, Washington.

Sutton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test poses a fun and unique challenge for assessing a 650-page book. It might make more sense to look at pages 99, and also 199, and 299, but the rules are the rules!

Page 99 focuses on the life and work of Franciscan priest Junípero Serra and the creation of the California mission system. Convinced he would fulfill prophecies of mass Indigenous conversion, Serra turned north after failures in Baja and helped plan a new network of missions in Alta California, home to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people already exposed to European disease. He stripped resources from southern missions to supply the new effort and celebrated early baptisms—often of sick children—as signs of divine promise, even as missionaries used aid to draw Native communities into the system. The passage also captures Serra’s extreme penitenial piety. During a sermon, he scourged himself so violently that a man imitated him and died in front of the crowd.

The larger purpose of the book is to explain why the United States looks so different from its peer nations when it comes to religion. Christianity has profoundly shaped American education, politics, economics, popular culture, and foreign policy. I argue that a godless Constitution and a First Amendment that guaranteed religious freedom did not weaken religion but supercharged it. Disestablisent encouraged religious leaders to become entrepreneurs, master new communicatin technologies, and compete aggressively for influence and authority.

The book traces 500 years of competing Christian visions and efforts to apply those visions to everyday life. I also highlight those caught in the middle, such as the Indigenous peoples Serra encountered, and the enslaved, religious minorities, and many others. Some rejected the faith that various Christians tried to impose on them; others embraced it and reshaped it into a tool of resistance, drawing on the God of Exodus to challenge the religious power structures.

This passage on page 99 matters because it shows that the effort to turn North America into God’s chosen land was not confined to the Atlantic seaboard. It stretched all the way to the Pacific. In fact, I open the book with earlier Catholic efforts in the Southwest to remind readers that the Puritans are not the beginning or source of Americans’ sense of divine mission.

Finally, I’m hoping that readers of my book will recognize that the current debates over American politics, polarization, and the culture wars are not new but have been baked into the nation from its very origins. I don’t think we can understand what’s happening in American culture today without understanding the role of religion in our past and the many ways it has been and is being used by competing groups of Americans.

Visit Matthew Avery Sutton's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Apocalypse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances Courtney Kneupper's "Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400"

Frances Courtney Kneupper is an Associate Professor of History at The University of Mississippi. She has spent her scholarly career focused on the voices of the marginalized in late medieval Europe. In particular, she has studied the way that spirituality, especially heresy and prophecy, have been used to express critiques of the status quo. She has published widely on prophecy and prophetic women in the Middle Ages, addressing the topics of prophecy, gender, and authority.

Kneupper applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400: Outsiders, Women, and Reformers, with the following results:

Page 99 discusses the renowned fourteenth century holy woman Catherine of Siena’s purported ability to know the future. Specifically, page 99 focuses on the assertions of Catherine’s most enthusiastic promotor, Raymond of Capua, who claimed to have witnessed Catherine’s successful prophecies. Raymond wrote about Catherine, “She possessed the gift of prophecy in so perfect of measure that, … as far as we could see, nothing was hidden from her…” This page occurs in a chapter which examines claims of prophecy made by and on behalf of holy women in the later fourteenth century. I argue that as holy women like Catherine became more involved in public, political life, they also increasingly used the gift of prophecy to legitimize their activism and political interventions. Prophecy became an entry point for women who did not have access to conventional authority to nevertheless exert unprecedented influence and power.

This page successfully reflects the overall enterprise of my book, which considers the crisis of authority in the late fourteenth century and the consequent debate over the gift of prophecy. As conventional authorities became mired in contention, new types of people, previously marginalized, began to speak on behalf of God. Among these, laywomen such as Catherine of Siena (and other lesser-known women) forged careers as activists and reformers. Although they encountered resistance, the new “prophets” were remarkably successful at commanding authority and moving the levers of power.

From a wider view, my book uses cases such as Catherine’s to demonstrate that the enigmatic gift of prophecy was utilized by non-elites and their supporters to successfully challenge the status quo and change the rules about who could speak on behalf of God. This book offers a detailed picture of the debates that existed in the Late Middle Ages, while also exploring matters of truth, gender, and authority that continue to impact balances of power today.

Who can know the will of God? Who has the authority to speak on His behalf? These questions have sparked debate from the earliest days of Christianity to the present moment. The questions were especially contentious in the late fourteenth century, when individuals who had previously been barred from positions of authority now used the gift of prophecy to influence politics and society. This is the heart of my book – studying the controversies that erupted as various previously excluded individuals professed to know divine will. One especially remarkable discovery is the successful argument made by both women and men that God had turned His back on clerics and now offered His divine wisdom exclusively to women, who, because of their humility and perceived lower status, had replaced men as the spiritually chosen.

Learn more about Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400 at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garrett Peck's "The Bright Edges of the World"

Garrett Peck is an author, historian, and tour guide in Santa Fe, specializing in adventure travel and historic and cultural interpretation. He leads the Willa Cather’s Santa Fe tour, teaches stargazing, and leads many other tours.

The author of nine books about American history, Peck’s latest is The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop. The book explores Cather’s travels to the Southwest that inspired her to write her “best book” (her words), Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Peck applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Bright Edges of the World and shared the following:

Page 99 of my Willa Cather book is a half-page of text, while the other half is a 1926 image of the Santa Fe Plaza with the St. Francis Cathedral in the background. It has a large number of black Ford Model Ts along the street, a reminder how the automobile became so widespread and affordable in the 1920s. On this page I wrote about the character of Santa Fe and the prevalence of Catholicism:

Santa Fe is a deeply Catholic city. It wasn’t uncommon in the early twentieth century to see nuns and priests walking about. The Catholic Church had a significant presence downtown. St. Francis Cathedral stands a block east of the Plaza, and just to the south were two Catholic parochial schools: Our Lady of Light Academy, the girls school known to most as the Loretto Academy, and St. Michael’s College for boys.

This is a pretty good measure of my book. Although Cather wasn’t Catholic, she wrote about two Catholic priests on the American frontier in the Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop, and so I wanted to create a sense of the Catholic presence in Santa Fe in my book. Cather was inundated with Catholic fan mail after the book came out in September 1927 (they are collected in a thick folder at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Libraries archive). She couldn’t respond to all these letters, so she penned an open letter to Commonweal magazine addressing their many questions about a book that she later called her “best book.” Her letter is a fabulous primary source that explained so much of what went into her novel.

My book, The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, is a history of Cather’s “best book.” As I’m a tour guide in Santa Fe, I focused on Cather’s travels to the Southwest and how much that inspired her fiction. I wrote the book conversationally to appeal to a wide range of readers, including those who want to go “a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the Archbishop,” as Cather wrote.

Visit Garrett Peck's website.

Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition.

Writers Read: Garrett Peck (January 2010).

The Page 99 Test: The Prohibition Hangover.

The Page 99 Test: Capital Beer.

The Page 99 Test: A Decade of Disruption.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas's "When the Good Life Goes Bad"

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University and has served as the executive director of both the Society of Christian Ethics, the Black Religious Scholars Group and is co-founder of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion. She has published ten books including Religion, Race, and COVID-19: Confronting White Supremacy in the Pandemic and The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture.

Floyd-Thomas applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, When the Good Life Goes Bad: The US and Its Seven Deadly Sins, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Understanding pride as the doctrinal dimension of the American good life is essential for distinguishing between the projections and shadows that myths cast. The American discipline of education and schooling produces knowledge that shapes what Americans consider to be good. In short, American education has long indoctrinated Americans to accept social and cultural norms (aka assumptions and lies) about themselves and others as fact. Pride or “knowledge without character” is the process by which Americans presume and impose the supremacy of their worldview to the exclusion of all others. Through an analysis of knowledge production and dissemination, this chapter explores the ways in which the privileged perspectives of some become the normalizing process by which the general public comes to believe in these death- dealing ideologies as they order our world.

In Christocentric terms, pride is the pinnacle of human hubris, whereby we focus on our own ability, an ability often rooted in delusions of grandeur. Where Hebrews 11:1 articulates that Christian faith is trusting in the divine, pride substitutes our own self-aggrandizing feats and self- serving facts as the source of the “assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” Philosopher David Hume assesses pride as a pleasant sensation and humility as a painful one. Many wise people have deemed pride to be the greatest of sins. Specifically, American pride emanates from American nationalism and the alleged magnanimity of the United States as a first world power. Many in the world regard the United States as a country proud in the extreme and profoundly lacking in national self-awareness. Take, for example, “Make America Great Again” as a political motto whose adherents exhibit their reluctance or inability to learn moral lessons from past great empires and to gauge its historical significance relative to them. American pride is founded upon Gandhi’s blunder of “knowledge without character.”

Rather than doing the hard work of gaining an enlightened, historically informed understanding of their nation, Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that self-knowledge is more about trusting their feelings of superiority, whether based on nationality, race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability. As a result, the goal of establishing and advancing common ideals such as fellowship, freedom, and flourishing is ignored. In short, America’s system of knowledge production privileges the national functionality of its citizens to the detriment of their national character and moral formation. The rising intolerance in the United States for critical reflection and analysis has coddled the American mind and compromised its ability to search for wisdom and to question untruths.

Page 99 appears in a chapter that frames “pride” as a doctrinal dimension of the American good life.

The core of the text is actually revealed on this page! A browser opening to page 99 would get a good idea of what When the Good Life Goes Bad is doing. The book is a theological and moral critique of the stories that shape American identity, and page 99 shows the engine of that critique: pride as “knowledge without character,” where confidence outruns wisdom and inherited assumptions get treated as fact. It also captures how I read culture as formation. Education and “knowledge production” are not neutral; they can function like catechesis, training citizens into “normal” ways of seeing and then baptizing those perspectives as universal.

I write as a theologian listening to public life. Scripture and moral philosophy sit beside the everyday habits that form us—what we celebrate, what we ignore, what we call “common sense.” If page 99 resonates, it may be because you recognize the feeling it names: certainty that isn’t wisdom, confidence that isn’t character. The page also signals a Christocentric contrast. Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as trust oriented toward God; pride replaces that trust with self-aggrandizing achievements, national myths, and self-serving “facts,” producing a certainty that resists correction. Readers will also see that this pride is not merely personal. It is communal and political—bound up with nationalism, privilege, and the way one group’s worldview becomes the standard by which everyone else is measured.

What page 99 cannot supply, on its own, is the book’s full architecture: how pride interlocks with other “shadows” cast by the American good life, how these ideologies take on everyday force, and how the argument turns toward moral formation and hope. Even so, as a browser’s shortcut, the Page 99 Test works well here.

If page 99 hooks you, the rest of the book shows why that diagnosis matters. I follow the American good life’s promises—fellowship, freedom, flourishing—and then track what those promises can conceal: exclusion, domination, and a growing intolerance for critical reflection that coddles the mind and dulls our capacity for wisdom. Along the way, I ask questions that refuse easy answers: Who benefits when nostalgia becomes moral authority? What happens when superiority feels like self-knowledge? The text helps us realize that we live in a time of gaslighting—public gaslighting. A time when the obvious is denied. When facts are treated as opinions. When propaganda is called patriotism. When cruelty is called “strength.” When greed is called “freedom.” When lies are called “just asking questions.” In such a world, faith must become more than comfort. Faith must become clarity. Or otherwise, faith becomes synonymous for lying.

Alas, this is not a book that settles for scolding or despair. It presses toward an alternative moral imagination: humility in place of hubris, historically informed self-awareness in place of myth, and character formed for the common good rather than national functionality. Page 99 gives you the thesis in sharp relief; the chapters that follow trace its consequences—and invite readers to imagine a good life that does not have to go bad.

Learn more about When the Good Life Goes Bad at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Seed's "Sails and Shadows"

Patricia Seed is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the award-winning author of To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico; American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches; and Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Sails and Shadows: How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade, with the following results:

This page focuses on the Portuguese explorer of Africa’s Atlantic coast, Diogo Cão. Despite being little known outside of Portugal his contemporaries viewed his voyages as a far more important than Barthlomew Dias’s because Cão was the first European to successfully sail south of the Equator, that is, without the help of a pole star. Furthermore, the page illustrates the common Portuguese tactic of ingratiating themselves with leaders of very wealthy African kingdoms, in this example, with the Congo. Their goals were twofold: to convert the leadership to Christianity and to establish an ongoing commercial relationship including cooperation with the slave trade.

Page 99 may surprise readers, who expected that any Portuguese encounter with Africans would result in the latter being deliberately harmed. Yet nothing of the sort happened in Congo. Far from altruism, Diogo Cão’s politeness sought to entice Congo elites into an orbit in which they would exploit or enslave other Africans in return for wealth the Portuguese could supply. Readers might view this information as creation of a web of complicity.

Much of the book explains how the Portuguese finally managed to cross the mid-Atlantic and return, a feat that had eluded sailors for thousands of years. Although Norsemen had briefly island-hopped across the northern rim, knowledge of the Americas remained hidden from Europeans and Africans until the breakthrough Portuguese voyages of the 1400s.

Learn more about Sails and Shadows at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

L. Archer Porter's "Homebodies"

Archer Porter interrogates the social, cultural, and economic life of performance in digital culture. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA and Masters from UNC-Greensboro. In her first monograph, Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, Porter examines the politics of everyday media production by amateur performers, grounded in the study of thousands of home dance videos online. Outputs of her research have been published in Documenta, Performance Research Journal, communication +1, International Journal of Screendance, Bloomsbury Handbook on Dance and Philosophy, and Etúdes. Porter is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Texas at Arlington.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Homebodies and shared the following:

On page 99 of Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, I describe how Instagram users maintain multiple accounts to brand themselves differently for different audiences, and how dance supports those brand distinctions. This discussion appears midway through the second chapter on “the dancing selfie,” a media form whose aesthetics and semiotics make clear that the dancer is recording themselves. Two dancers whose home dance videos I analyze earlier in the chapter reappear here, and their posts and profiles continue to serve as tools for unpacking the choreographies of intimacy and circulations of authenticity in digital culture. By considering their Instagram accounts as a whole on this page, I suggest how each dancer crafts a personal brand through the dancing body, domestic space, and autobiographical narrative, all organized into a coherent aesthetic.

Page 99 is a representative snapshot of Homebodies, particularly in how it foregrounds the neoliberal co-optation of the dancing body on social media—a central concern of my theory of intimaesthetics. This theory names the aestheticization of intimacy in Web 2.0, especially through self-produced media that stage interior life, private space, and personal narrative. On platforms like Instagram, however, home dance videos play directly into systems that harvest intimate data and refashion the person as a product for the capitalist marketplace. In the book’s introduction, I draw on Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to critique the “sophisticated ergonomics” of neoliberal capitalism in new media, showing how these systems tap into the most interior dimensions of subjectivity and convert them into marketable forms. Personal branding on social media is a key expression of this process.

The discussion on page 99 demonstrates this dynamic by focusing on the everyday, choreographic manifestations of the “new spirit of capitalism” online. It shows how home dancers produce media that reflect and refine their personal brands, and how platforms actively encourage and reward this crafting of persona. In this sense, the page functions as a concise portrait of intimaesthetics as a whole.

The reference to two dancers who have honed the practice of the dancing selfie also signals a more structural feature of the book. Each chapter centers on just two home dance videos, which I analyze closely to trace their choreographic mechanisms, media genealogies, and platform politics. This deliberate focus counters social media’s overabundance of images and its corresponding lack of critical attention to the aesthetic regimes it creates and promulgates.

What page 99 cannot fully convey, however, is the book’s sustained attention to the body and its framing. Throughout Homebodies, I engage in choreographic analysis to show how intimacy is produced and how it enters different circuits of circulation. A dancer might cultivate closeness by closing his eyes and drifting in and out of frame, as if unaware of the camera—an image that circulates as privacy with a surveillance aesthetic. Or he might dance in the kitchen with a mop, as if pausing from household labor. Whatever the scene, movement, or framing, Homebodies treats choreographic intimacy as the anchor for its social, cultural, and economic life on the platform.

Visit Archer Porter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yonatan Green's "Rogue Justice"

Yonatan Green is an Israeli-American attorney and an author, most recently a Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for the Constitution. He co-founded and was Executive Director of the Israel Law & Liberty Forum.

Green applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rogue Justice closes out my theoretical discussion of the dominant form of statutory interpretation in Israel, called “Objective Purposive Interpretation” (or “OPI”). Under this novel method, judges can apply a statute according to what its purpose ought to be, in their own estimation – really. The page includes a quote from renowned Prof. Stanley Fish critiquing OPI (“you have broken free of any and all constraints on what you then declare the law to be”), and summarizes a central flaw of this interpretive method – that it explicitly enables courts to make binding decisions based on “the entirely personal and prejudiced moral ideology of each and every judge.” I finish the section by writing: “The use of OPI renders legislation meaningless, legislators powerless, and the legislative process futile.” The page then continues on to another section, in which I examine a striking and perplexing similarity between Justice Aharon Barak (pioneer of OPI), and Justice Antonin Scalia (paragon of judicial restraint and textualism).

I think the Page 99 Test works for my book – partially. Rogue Justice is an analytical, scholarly, rigorous critique of the Israeli legal system, and especially of the doctrines developed by the Israeli Supreme Court over the past four decades. This page sums up the overall critique against one of the core pillars of Israeli judicial supremacy – a wild and unparalleled form of statutory interpretation, which openly flouts legal, democratic and linguistic norms and which grants judges unrivaled governing power. Much of the book involves a serious principled and theoretical examination of the Court’s doctrines, and this page shows the tail-end of such a discussion. The page refers to a well-known expert, reflecting the book’s spirit because so much of the book endeavors to present the critiques of prominent legal scholars, and not solely my own views. One might fairly say that more than anything else, this book compiles a vast array of arguments advanced by leading legal figures against the Israeli Court’s supremacist jurisprudence.

The last sentence quoted above (in the page description), which closes the section, reflects my effort that the book be accessible, readable and enjoyable – I try and condense core arguments into memorable zingers which pack a punch (and are no less true for it). As I continue to the next section, I raise a point of interest to American readers (Scalia vs. Barak), and this too reflects an overall goal of the book, bridging the gap between a far-off jurisdiction and a foreign non-Israeli audience. Further, I think the section (albeit in the next page) makes a non-intuitive and nuanced argument (namely, that Barak and Scalia reach the same conclusion but for completely opposite and contradictory reasons), something which the book does quite often.

The page is missing two significant elements. First, throughout the book I regularly refer to real-life examples and to judicial decisions. This is missing from the current page, making the book seem more theoretical and less practical than it really is. Second, the page has very few endnote references, which is unusual – the book is supported by a vast array of sources and notes, meticulously researched, which typically adorn (and sometimes crowd) every page. Indeed, a key emphasis of my book is how much the granular details matter. In that sense, the very notion of a single page capturing the book’s “essence” is, by definition, contrary to the book’s essential claim. Nonetheless, I think this page provides a useful and not-misleading glimpse into Rogue Justice, its style, and its substance.

Visit Yonatan Green's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patti M. Marxsen's "Karen Blixen’s Search for Self"

Patti M. Marxsen is an essayist, biographer, independent scholar, and translator (FR>EN) whose writings have been published in the USA, Europe, and the Caribbean. She is the author of three biographical studies, two essay collections, a collection of short fiction, and numerous articles and reviews related to visual art and Haitian literature.

Her books include Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own and Jacques Roumain: A Life of Resistance.

Marxsen applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Karen Blixen's Search for Self: The Making of "Out of Africa" (LSU Press), with the following results:

Page 99 of my book proves the astute observation of Ford Madox Ford to be true in many ways. On that page, I begin with the fact that animals are everywhere in Karen Blixen’s famous memoir of her idealized African world. In that sense, Out of Africa echoes her idyllic early childhood in nineteenth-century Denmark where “dogs, horse, and birds were ever-present.”

This gets complicated, however, when Blixen compares Black African people to animals … as she does, throughout her book, with statements such as, “The old dark clear-eyed Native of Africa, and the old dark clear-eyed Elephant, they are alike.” For this she has been criticized by post-colonial scholars who read her animal metaphors as evidence of racism since racism was, clearly, built into the framework of British Colonialism and she was, in fact, a colonizer by choice. Yet when neither species is deliberately diminished—as in the example of a wise old elephant—another perspective emerges that goes to heart of a current culture debate that dares to question human superiority as the basis of modern “humanism” vs. the wisdom of the animal world as an essential aspect of what many scholars refer to as “post-humanism.” As Danish scholar Peter Mortensen points out, Karen Blixen’s unique vision represents one of the early examples of “post-humanism” because it recognizes a necessary balance of human/animal interaction.

This issue is one of several that emerges in my book as I offer a twenty-first-century reading of a twentieth-century classic, beginning with a “deep dive” into how Karen Blixen thought and lived with issues of colonialism, racism, and feminism in a section titled “Contested Legacy.” I also untangle a kind of “identity theft” in that section with regard the blockbuster film in 1985 that posthumously romanticizes Blixen’s difficult life.

I find it fascinating that one page of a book can serve as a kind of “on ramp” to the many complex issues I explore through the lens of a memoir first published in 1937. That said, I would argue that a true understanding of Karen Blixen’s life and work requires several angles of vision—and many more pages.

Visit Patti M. Marxsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alec Worsnop's "Rebels in the Field"

Alec Worsnop is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park where he direct the Military Perspectives Speaker Series and is a Research Fellow in the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rebels in the Field: Cadres and the Development of Insurgent Military Power, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book walks through the way in which Việt Minh sought to develop a modern military system by selecting a cadre of small unit leaders who could plan effective military operations and train their troops. It comes in a chapter that assesses the performance of various Vietnamese insurgent groups as they countered the French during the First Indochina War (1945-1954). While the victory of the Việt Minh, the predecessor for the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, also known as the Việt Cong), looms large in the 20th century, as the conflict started, the French were less worried about the Việt Minh than many of its competitors.

This page actually touches on one of the core themes in the broader book. Rebels in the Field departs from the existing research into insurgent behavior by explicitly focusing on the military processes involved in deploying force in substate conflicts. To conduct guerrilla warfare, groups have to fight well. While perhaps a weapon of the ‘weak’, guerrilla warfare is not a weapon of the tactically incapable. And the things that help groups to organize in the first place, ideology, religious, social ties, do not necessarily help organizations to fight well, and can actually impair military development.

To fight this way, I argue that insurgents, like any other military actor, need capable small units that can fire and maneuver without suffering extensive losses. To do this, I draw on much research into conventional militaries and hold that a key linchpin in this process is capable small-unit combat leaders. When facing much stronger foes, creative small-unit combat leaders can "punch above their weight." Not only do they lead effective operations, but lay the groundwork for military adaptation and resilience from the bottom-up.

The Việt Minh is an archetypal case of the importance of military development. While their success is often attributed to their Communist ideology, leaders in the organization were painfully aware that ideological commitment did not generate military capacity. As I elaborate on page 99, "General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the commander of the Việt Minh forces, advised that 'it is necessary to carry out regular training systematically and according to plan, proceeding from the rank and file upwards … The army must be trained to master modern techniques, tactical use of arms, coordinated tactics, and modern military service.'"

In this context, the chapter on the Việt Minh helps to explain how the Việt Minh, which looked weak at the onset of the war, developed into one of the most successful insurgent militaries in the 20th century, defeating the French in a set battle at Ðiện Biên Phủ. The chapter ends by quoting a French post-mortem which recognized that the French military had underestimated the immense effort the Việt Minh put into developing a professional military.

The following chapters, covering the US interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, identify similar dynamics. As with the Việt Minh, the groups that fought well did not do so based on their religious, political, and social endowments, but instead developed a cadre of small-unit combat leaders who served as the back bone of their military efforts.

Visit Alec Worsnop's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bianca J. Baldridge's "Laboring in the Shadows"

Bianca J. Baldridge is Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. She is the author of Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youthwork (2019).

Baldridge applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work, and reported the following:

On page 99, you’ll find the beginning of Chapter Four, titled “Protecting Youth, Protecting Ourselves.” I begin the chapter with two quotes. The first is from the extraordinary feminist scholar, activist, and poet, Audre Lorde. The second is from Chris, a youth worker from the Midwest and an interview participant in my book. Like Lorde, he’s a poet and activist. He’s also dedicated his life to working with youth in community-based educational spaces.

I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference . . . Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
–Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays

We have to take care of ourselves, take care of each other, honor memories, and honor legacies that just don’t exist in the same way for other people.
–Chris, youth worker

I began this chapter with these two quotes because they speak to the struggle to be well and to care for the self amid struggle, pain, and structural harm, while also trying to care for others. The opening paragraph describes an experience Chris had while giving a guest lecture at a local university, where he wanted to protect himself and to honor and respect the memory of a former student he lost to gun violence.

This test works for part of the book but not for the entire book. But it does capture a very important part! That is, how do community-based youth workers—professionals in youth organizations who educate, nurture, and guide young people through many forms of development—take care of themselves in a loosely organized field that can be quite precarious due to low wages, high turnover, housing and food insecurity, etc., while also taking care of young people as they cope with structural harm. I believe that page 99 will give readers a sense of how skilled youth workers are at managing the nuances that arise in their work.

In my book, I argue that because youth workers, particularly in nonprofits, are situated as care and education workers, their work is typically viewed as “noble,” which ultimately furthers their exploitation. For Black youth workers, I make the case that this precarity is exacerbated by racial discrimination and racial microaggressions. Despite the challenges I raise, my book also shares their visions for the future and how joy serves as a tool of resistance and protection for youth workers and the young people they work with. Laboring in the Shadows highlights precarity and invisibility while demonstrating the power and promise of youth work as a sustaining and necessary force in Black educational and social life.

Visit Bianca J. Baldridge's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan Seale-Feldman's "The Work of Disaster"

Aidan Seale-Feldman is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and a research associate at the Centre d’anthropologie culturelle (CANTHEL) at the Université Paris Cité in France.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Work of Disaster tells a story called “Vishal’s Medicine.” Vishal was a man I met in an earthquake-affected village in rural Nepal who received psychosocial counseling and medication after the disaster. He was one of many people who discovered such treatments because of the seismic rupture and the post-earthquake humanitarian psychosocial interventions that followed. Around the time of the earthquakes, Vishal had been suffering from troubling episodes of incoherent wandering in the forest which he described as jangali, wildness. The story on page 99 takes place three years after the post-disaster mental health program phased out, during a follow-up trip I made back to Nepal to explore the afterlives of humanitarian intervention.

I think readers opening the book to page 99 would get a clear idea of some of the core issues I address in the work as a whole. In fact, I used to give talks that would start with a photograph of Vishal’s medicine: three blister packs of pills–red, blue, and green–on a plastic shopping bag laid out on a patch of Himalayan earth [image left]. I felt this image and the story that accompanied it cut to the heart of the key question that I raise in the book: What are the consequences of transient care, in a world of cascading disasters?

Vishal’s story is exemplary for multiple reasons. Like many of the clients treated by the post- disaster psychosocial program, Vishal did not conform to humanitarian assumptions of the “earthquake victim.” Vishal’s suffering began before the earthquakes, and he was prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant medication by an NGO because he happened to live in the disaster zone. When humanitarians deemed the “crisis” of mental health in Nepal to be over, Vishal was once again left to manage his affliction on his own in a region with minimal access to psychopharmaceuticals. The temporary prescription of psychiatric drugs in the earthquake- affected districts is one of the most troubling aspects of the story of disaster and mental health in Nepal.

At the same time, Vishal’s story confounds our (now well established) anthropological expectations that humanitarian interventions are solely a form of violence, or that global mental health is simply a mode of medical imperialism. Despite the obstacles of access, after the program phased out Vishal chose to continue taking the medication he discovered through the work of disaster, whatever the cost. Vishal continued his treatment because it made him feel better and allowed him to return to health, which he defined as being able to care for his children, his animals, and to work the land. Ultimately Vishal’s challenge was one of chronicity. When I met him years later, he was strong and had just come from planting rice, but he was also ambivalent about the efficacy of his treatment. He worried that he might have to take psychiatric drugs for life. The story of Vishal’s medicine not only raises questions regarding the ethics of brief humanitarian psychosocial interventions but it is also an example of what disaster generates, and the limits and possibilities of transient care.

Visit Aidan Seale-Feldman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan VanGorder's "A Mother’s Work"

Megan VanGorder is assistant professor of history at Illinois State University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War–Era Nurse, and shared the following:

The top half of Page 99 of A Mother’s Work is occupied by an image of a large building, the Illinois Soldier’s Orphan’s Home, which was officially opened to occupants in August 1867 in Normal, Illinois. In front of the building, the reader can discern a row of children. They are dwarfed by the grandeur of the building, but they stand out because they all dressed in white and neatly assembled. These children are presumably the orphans or half-orphans of Illinois Civil War soldiers who occupy the home.

The remaining text on page 99 states:

[Mary Bickerdyke] also inserted herself into traditionally male-dominated aspects of organizational development, influencing fundraising efforts, teacher and matron assignments, and even decisions about the home’s location.

Publicly, the creation of the Illinois Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home was the province of powerful Illinois men eager to publicly demonstrate their dedication to fallen soldiers and their families. Even before the guns fell silent, state leaders began to anticipate the social and financial responsibilities that would accompany peace. As the Civil War was still being waged across the South, the Illinois General Assembly recommended a “tax for destitute families of soldiers, schools for soldier’s [sic] orphans, and a state sanitary bureau” to prepare for the postwar reality in early 1865. Governor Richard Yates entreated the state’s citizens to support the measure and invoked their patriotism and collective obligation to the general welfare of their neighbors: “No State is worthy of its sovereignty, and no government the respect of its people, who will not protect and nurture the children of its soldiers...”

The Page 99 Test hints at the major themes of the book and works reasonably well as a way to understand how Mary Bickerdyke consistently worked to “insert herself into traditionally male-dominated” spaces. However, the page only contains a single example of that lifelong journey. From page 99 alone, a reader might reasonably assume the book is primarily about the founding of the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home or about state-level policy formation. In reality, the institutional story is one strand within a broader exploration of how one woman leveraged Civil War service to reimagine authority, obligation, and maternal citizenship in the nineteenth century.

The image of the Illinois Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home visually signals that this book is not simply a wartime narrative, but a study of how wartime service translated into long-term structures of veteran and dependent care. The accompanying text underscores one of the book’s core arguments that Bickerdyke did not merely operate within accepted feminine spheres of professionalism but took direct action to influence institutions pertaining to soldier or veteran care. The page also situates this example of her work within the broader political culture, showing how male state leaders publicly claimed authority over commemorative and welfare efforts while women like Bickerdyke exerted influence in ways that were less visible but no less consequential.

A Mother’s Work spans four decades of Mary Bickerdyke’s tireless efforts to legitimize herself as a professional caregiver and the ways in which she utilized her reputation as “Mother” to effectively accomplish those goals.

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--Marshal Zeringue