Joseph Turow's "The Problem with Personalization"

Joseph Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries Emeritus in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of thirteen books and the editor of five, including The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet; The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power; and The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth.

Turow applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age, and shared the following:

As it happens, page 99 of The Problem with Personalization marks the beginning of chapter 4 of 8 chapters. In that sense, it lies squarely in the middle of the book, and of my argument. The book’s subtitle is “How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Time to the AI Age.” Chapters 1-3 tackle the pre-internet versions of personalization, from street hawkers and peddlers of centuries past to the rise of direct mail and direct marketing in the 20th century. Those chapters demolish the widespread notion that personalization in advertising is a product of the 21st century; far from it. Chapter 4 pivots to our current century. It and the ones that follow show how advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization. But advertisers of today do that using artificial intelligence and the internet. They weaponize data in unprecedented ways that drive mono-segmentation and, over the next decades, the disappearance of shared reality and community.

Chapter 4 is called “Cookies, Barcodes, Smartphones, and Location Targeting: The Internet Takes the Direct Marketing Crown.” Here is how it begins on page 99:

In 1994 Lou Montulli worked for Netscape Communications, a company that made the Netscape Navigator World Wide Web browser. His bosses asked him to address a difficulty bedeviling companies trying to sell things in the new web world. There was no way to keep track of an individual’s visits to or clicks on a website. Online stores could therefore sell only one item at a time. If you wanted to buy something on a store’s site, you would click to place it in the website’s “shopping cart” and then you would have to check out right at that moment. You could not leave it in the cart and look again on the site for something to buy because you’d lose the first item. The website had no way to know if the same visitor was coming back to the cart. To grease the wheels of browser commerce, Montulli was, in essence, charged with creating a persistent identity tracker for an individual’s presence where others at Netscape had tried and failed.

This, page 100 points out, was the beginning of the cookie. The cookie was crucial to making direct marketing the mainstream model for audience construction in the internet era. It caused marketers to continually search for ways to splinter their profiles of consumers and then target them using those hypersegmented, even individualized, understandings. Chapters 4 through 8 cover how that process evolved into a new era of predictive and generative artificial intelligence—and what it means for individuals and the larger society.

A person reading page 99 alone would probably not get a good idea of the entire work because the Montulli anecdote, not the book’s theme, takes center stage. The chapter title may offer a hint of the prior and forthcoming topics, but certainly not in an explicit way. Nevertheless, a reader of the book will find page 99 as a crucial pivot in the book’s trajectory. At this point the story is moving from the “mass” oriented analog and early digital-media environment of the late twentieth century (think cable TV, CDs, and early PCs) to our era where artificial intelligence technologies linked to increasingly personalized digital platforms are transforming our lives fundamentally. Chapter 5 is called “Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Identity Resolution: AI and The Data Deluge.” Charter 6's title is “Dynamic Personalizations, Unprecedented Permutations, Virtual Influencers: Enter Gen. A.” Chapter 7 deals with “Consumer Data and the Law Governments Pushback, Marketers Push Forward,” and Chapter 8 confronts the basic question “Why Don't People Revolt?”

So, while page 99 doesn’t presage all this, it serves as the key entry point for it. Perhaps that’s a useful variation on the Ford Madox Ford quote.

Stepping back to focus on the book’s theme, I ought to say that concerns, including in my own work, about marketers’ data-hoovering activities typically focus on privacy. But I have come to believe that companies’ frenetic drives toward AI-created personalization is leading to an even costlier predicament: It is making it impossible to sustain the kind of healthy media system required to cultivate a healthy society. That is why I wrote The Problem of Personalization. The book makes its argument by telling stories that put the personalization problem into historical, technological, legal and social perspectives. I hope this discussion of page 99 makes you want to explore the book as a whole.

Learn more about The Problem with Personalization at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Xian Aubin Wang's "Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan"

Xian Aubin Wang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024, and reported the following:

Page 99 sets the stage by comparing the oral history testimonies of a Muslim villager with the official accounts of the conflicts that developed between the Shadian Muslim militia and the Maoist revolutionary People’s Militia. Unlike the narratives of the Maoist work teams that blame the Muslim villagers as a “chaos-making mob,” the oral testimony indicates that the Muslim villagers established their own militia because they felt threatened by the aggression of the weaponized Maoist revolutionary militia, from whom the villagers attempted to seize guns. The antagonism between the two groups intensified, and members of both sides engaged in armed conflict. The page concludes by stressing that the official narratives “offer little information about how a series of conflicts between the Shadian Muslim militia and the People’s Militia unfolded, leading to the Party Center’s direct intervention and the eventual negotiations between Muslim representatives and top CCP leaders in Beijing.”

The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well because it introduces a crucial point that the book makes to readers. That is, besides official documents, Muslim villagers’ written materials and oral testimonies are vital sources that allow us to more comprehensively understand the religious motives and agency of individuals who resisted Maoist work teams and the PLA in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, the voices of the Muslim villagers are integral to the book as a whole.

The page begins with the term “religious traitor[s],” who are nowhere to be mentioned in the official documents. Nonetheless, the Muslim villagers’ oral testimonies revealed that these “religious traitors”, identified as local CCP Muslim leaders, cooperated with Maoist work teams to ban Islamic practice, close mosques, and blaspheme Islam. In other words, the Maoist work teams cultivated a patron-client relationship between Maoist revolutionaries and local CCP Muslim cadres, through which the secular state power was able to infiltrate into the religious communities, further escalating the tensions between the atheist revolutionary state, Muslim collaborators, and the ordinary Muslim villagers. Without oral history interviews, such important local dynamics would have been neglected as we interpret how conflict between the Muslim villagers and the party-state originated, developed, and escalated to the point of antagonism.

As the first study investigating how and why conflicts between the Chinese Communist Party authorities and southern Yunnan Muslims, beginning in the early 1950s, culminated in the 1975 massacre, this book suggests a new methodological approach to understanding the development of conflicts between state power and religious communities in borderland regions by emphasizing the importance of connecting elite politics and statecraft to local dynamics and experiences.

Learn more about Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Grace Newman's "The Future in Their Hands"

Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, family, and social inequality. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University. At Colgate, she teaches on these themes and other topics in modern Latin American, global history, and historical methods.

Newman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite, with the following results:

What’s on page 99 of The Future in Their Hands:

This falls in the book’s fifth chapter, set in the mid-twentieth century. That chapter explores the political agenda of Mexican students studying abroad, mostly in the United States. This agenda, I argue, was not explicitly ideological and perhaps seems even apolitical: young, middle-class Mexicans sought to protect and uplift their social status by securing generous scholarships to support themselves and their families, expecting that their foreign degrees would ultimately shore up their future careers with prestige and good salaries.

On page 99, we find several stories relating to Mexican students’ family commitments both during and after their studies abroad. First, we encounter the end of the story of Concepción Reza Inclán, who studied economics at UCLA in 1952-1953. She sat for several interviews with a researcher during her time in Los Angeles, and she told the interviewer that she aspired to be both a professional economist and a wife, which the interviewer found hard to believe possible. On page 99, we learn that in 1959, several years after returning from UCLA, she was working as an economist for Nestlé México. I explain that we don’t know whether she also had formed her own family by that point. It is the case, though, that some US-educated Mexican women I interviewed ended up being very successful researchers and mothers, too.

In the mid-twentieth century, scholarship program officers (such as those working for the Rockefeller Foundation) saw women’s family commitments as impediments to their professional careers, and so they were generally unsupportive of women who married or worse, had children. However, as I explain on this page, the Rockefeller was also unsupportive of men who provided for family members other than their wives or children. Subscribing to a vision of a breadwinner for the nuclear family that presumed that young professional men did not need to take care of their own parents, siblings, or other relatives, Rockefeller officers were surprised to find that the Mexican students they invest in with scholarships had just these kinds of “other dependents.” As I explain on page 99, these commitments were common, but usually scholarship recipients were not given extra support from the Rockefeller to provide for these relatives. An exception was one young playwright, considered to be very promising, Jorge Ibargüengoitia—who did actually become famous several years later. Because he negotiated for it, he garnered an extra stipend of $80 monthly so that he could continue to support his widowed mother and his aunt back in Mexico while he was studying theater in the United States.

Does the Page 99 Test work for this book?

The sources I used to write page 99 are some of my favorites, so the test pinpointed a place where my personal scholarly predilections really come through. Indeed, this test works fairly well for my book, although the contents of page 99 might come as a surprise to the browser who opened up to this page after seeing the book cover. Invoking “foreign-educated Mexicans” (as in the book title) usually brings a very specific image to mind: US-trained technocrats who ushered Mexico into neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. But I’m interested in how Mexicans pursued foreign education, what scholarship programs aimed to do and how they worked, and how upwardly mobile youth’s ambitions and experiences abroad related to their social origins. That will be an unexpected turn for many readers, and page 99 indicates just how deep we venture into the social history of Mexico’s ordinary elite. In the book, I argue that social imperatives were just as important as intellectual (or political) motives for studying abroad because a foreign education both signified and enhanced Mexican social privilege. That privilege was conditioned by family responsibilities and gender norms, both points which come across on page 99.

Elsewhere in the book, we learn about the political history of their relationship with state institutions. The book’s main argument is that the Mexican state created cohorts of foreign-educated Mexicans through scholarship programs at the behest of ambitious elites themselves. The idea is that scholarship programs, whether yoked to discourses of nationalism, modernization, or development, have always obeyed a hidden agenda: opportunities for elites to shore up their own status with support from the state in the form of merit-based, selective benefits. The Mexican state is mostly absent on this page (though its first systematic scholarship program, run by the Banco de México, does get a mention, and it is featured elsewhere in the book). But page 99 is not quite misleading because my book is not only about the Mexican state, but about the forces outside of it in Mexican society and even beyond Mexico that shaped its policy. The Mexican state was never been the only source for funds to study abroad. Besides family-financed study, Mexican students have also had access to scholarships from foreign and international organizations, like the Rockefeller.

Visit Rachel Grace Newman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christian B. Miller's "The Honesty Crisis"

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is the author of over 130 articles as well as Moral Psychology (2021), Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a contributor for Forbes, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Thanks to a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty.

Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Culture Building. The biggest influence on student cheating is what their peers are doing. So the appropriate counterbalance, it seems, is to build a culture of honesty and integrity in a school.

A centerpiece of such culture building is often an honor code. As one researcher defines it, “An honor code is a community code of conduct guided by ethical principles defining the expectations for students to act with honesty and integrity and acknowledging the shared responsibility of all members” (Tatum 2022: 33).

In my experience, such codes are pretty familiar in the U.S., but not nearly as much in other places around the world. So some examples might help. Here, for instance, is the honor code that students at my school have to affirm:

"Wake Forest University is an academic community that subscribes to an honor system. By accepting membership in this community, each student assumes the obligation to be trustworthy in all pursuits. I pledge that I have not given or received information concerning this exam."

The Page 99 Test works okay, but not great, I would say. Combined with the title of the book, The Honesty Crisis, the reader should get the impression from this page that one area of society that I am worried about when it comes to dishonesty is student cheating, and furthermore that I am offering some concrete recommendations on how to address that cheating. At the same time, the reader won't get an impression of what the five other honesty crises are that I address, as well as the chapters on what honesty is, how there is some good news coming from psychology, and why honesty is an important virtue which is worth preserving.

To give a little bit more of an introduction to the rest of the book, I define an honesty crisis as any situation in which dishonest behavior has become incentivized to a greater degree, and at the same time it has become harder to catch or detect. That's a bad combination. In addition to AI student cheating, I also discuss in detail online infidelity, deepfakes, sermon plagiarism, celebrity and dishonesty, and political misinformation. I also try to offer some practical suggestions for addressing these crises, where appropriate, in order to preserve what I argue is an incredibly important virtue.

Visit Christian B. Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig S. Simpson's "Television is Where You Find It"

Craig S. Simpson is the director of special collections and archives at San José State University. He is the coauthor of Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings, with Gregory S. Wilson, and Cinema Then and Now: James Naremore—Conversations with Craig S. Simpson.

Simpson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Television Is Where You Find It: A History of Feature Filmmakers in TV, and reported the following:

Readers flipping directly to page 99 would have their attention grabbed by the only f-bomb in the entire 201pp. book. It’s near the top of the page, in a quote by pioneering Black filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles: “We have this romantic idea that all blacks should be radicals. Get the fuck out of here!” It soon becomes clear that this quote concerns the very non-radical Bill Cosby, as he transitioned from standup comedy to being the first Black lead (or co-lead, with white actor Robert Culp) of a TV series, NBC’s I Spy (1965-1968). I note that I Spy’s “international locales took the series out of the racial turmoil of 1960s America,” and then I quote scholar Donald Bogle’s observation, “Consequently…it was felt that audiences would never question such matters as hotel accommodations in foreign lands.”

After I Spy, the page continues, Cosby created and starred in The Bill Cosby Show, which premiered on NBC in September 1969. (This series preceded the more famous The Cosby Show, a cultural phenomenon that aired on the same network from 1984-1992.) Compared to the other networks, NBC was ahead of the curve “for the equitable portrayal of minorities on TV.” The National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters “followed NBC’s example with its members pledging that ‘racial or nationality types shall not be shown on television in such matter as to ridicule the race or nationality.”

There’s a section break, followed by a discussion of the mixed-bag of opportunities afforded to Black creatives through the 1950s and 1960s—from the pernicious Beulah and Amos ‘n’ Andy to the more positive if politically skittish Julia (starring Diahann Carroll) and The Bill Cosby Show. The last paragraph on page 99 ends in media res with a description of how the premiere of Cosby’s new show “illustrates how Cosby’s modus operandi was to approach a relevant social issue only to gingerly sidestep it,” which continues on page 100.

Page 99 comes little more than a third of the way into the seventh chapter of a ten-chapter critical study, twelve counting the “Intro” and “Outro.” For readers who turned to it without context, the page would be misleading in terms of content but an accurate example of my overall approach. I should take pains to emphasize that Bill Cosby is not a major figure in the book, nor is he even the primary subject of the chapter. Chapter 7 concerns Melvin Van Peebles, and uses his episode for The Bill Cosby Show, “Really Cool,” as a case study for how he transitioned (briefly) to television in between a pair of significant motion pictures, Watermelon Man and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. My chapter posits that “Really Cool” serves as a bridge between the two films in terms of technique (blending the aesthetics of American sitcoms with the French New Wave [Van Peebles lived in France for several years prior to returning to the States]) and theme (the historical and political meanings of Melvin Donaldson’s “image of the ‘running black man’”). I discuss how Van Peebles undercuts Cosby’s persona throughout the episode. I also observe that Melvin Van Peebles and Orson Welles (the subject of Chapter 4) had more in common than one might think.

As I explain in the Intro, Television is Where You Find It “offers a tour through an earlier period of television, with ten feature filmmakers who made the transition to TV as our collective guide.” Spanning the years 1955-1990, my book begins with Alfred Hitchcock and ends with David Lynch, with (in addition to Van Peebles and Welles) Leo McCarey, Ida Lupino, Budd Boetticher, Michael Powell, George Cukor, and Martin Scorsese heading the chapters in between. Also from my Intro: “Each chapter blends critical analysis of the particular episode in question with broader context pertaining to the overall series, comparisons to other programs, the body of work of each filmmaker, and the wider culture of the era, using archival resources when available. Each case study gets woven into the whole.” Page 99 offers a taste of that.

Television is Where You Find It was a rigorous yet fun book to research and write, and I hope readers will find its connections and discoveries surprising, absorbing, and illuminating.

Learn more about Television Is Where You Find It at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kieran J. O'Keefe's "Suffering for the Crown"

Kieran J. O'Keefe is Assistant Professor of History at Lyon College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Suffering for the Crown: The Hudson Valley Loyalists and the Violence of Revolution, with the following results:

From page 99:

Although some of this violence was opportunistic freebooting, much of it was driven by a desire for revenge. In November 1777, soldiers under William Tryon’s command had burned homes on Philipsburg Manor. Continental general Samuel Holden Parsons wrote to Tryon, criticizing his attack, saying that there was “no benefit” whatsoever for burning the homes, and that it had been done solely to be cruel. He also chastised Tryon for stripping “women and children of necessary apparel to cover them from the severity of a cold night.” Parsons warned that he did not want to conduct war in this cruel manner, but that he would retaliate in kind if necessary. Tryon replied by reminding Parsons that Patriots had burned New York City in 1776 (as Tryon believed), leaving many more people exposed to a cold night than he had done in this attack. Because Tryon felt that Revolutionaries had refused to conduct the war in an honorable manner, he would not cease his aggressive tactics. Tryon added that he would “burn every Committee Man’s house within my reach” and that he was willing to offer a reward of twenty-five dollars for each committeeman brought to British lines.

This text explains some of the violence in Westchester County, New York, during the American Revolutionary War. Perhaps no county anywhere in the United States was more ravaged by the conflict than Westchester. The northern section of the county was controlled by the American Revolutionaries, the southern portion by the British, while the area in between was the "neutral ground," or really a violent no-man's land. The back-and-forth violence in Westchester County led to many retaliatory raids, including the one undertaken by Royal Governor William Tryon on page 99. In particular, Tryon vented his anger at members of committees of safety, which were revolutionary bodies overseeing the war effort on the local level, and which were generally responsible for suppressing Loyalist activity.

I think this excerpt gives readers a decent idea of what part of the book is about. Chapters two and three (this passage is from chapter three) look at the Revolution as a civil war in the Hudson Valley, which highlights the struggle between Patriots and Loyalists. But the remainder of the book goes in a different direction. Chapter four explores Loyalist reintegration after the war, while chapters five and six look at the experiences of Loyalists who went into exile, primarily in what is now Canada. Indeed, a major goal of the book is to see how a violent civil war shaped the Loyalists of the Hudson Valley down the road, which is not apparent in the excerpt. So, page 99 gives readers a flavor of the book without revealing its whole scope.

Learn more about Suffering for the Crown at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chloe Chapin's "Suitable"

Chloe Chapin holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University and master's degrees in fashion and textile studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology and costume design from the Yale School of Drama. She has taught fashion history, costume design, gender studies, and anthropology. As a costume designer for over twenty years, her credits include Broadway musicals, opera, and Shakespeare.

Chapin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men, and shared the following:

If you open Suitable to page 99, you will find yourself smack in the middle of a discussion about the historical evolution of the engineering of crotches of men’s trousers. The page details the nineteenth-century transition from tight, light-colored breeches and pantaloons (which proudly displayed men’s calves and genitals) to the roomier, darker trousers we recognize today. I note that as the construction of pants shifted, "a man was now forced to pick one leg-tube or the other for his genitals to occupy." This anatomical reality required bespoke tailors to ask clients which side they "dressed on" (left or right) so the pattern could be skillfully cut to accommodate them.

I laughed out loud when I turned to page 99. Readers opening to this page would get a fantastic—if perhaps unexpectedly intimate—idea of the whole book. While a reader might be momentarily caught off guard by the focus on male genitalia, this page does perfectly encapsulate the book's central thesis: the modern male suit is not a natural or neutral garment, but a highly engineered piece of technology designed to reshape and conceal the male body. The test works brilliantly here as a browser's shortcut to the book's core themes.

Suitable traces the "Sartorial Revolution" from the late eighteenth through the mid- nineteenth centuries, exploring how and why white men abandoned the colorful, decorative fashions of the aristocracy in favor of the plain, dark uniform of the modern suit (a shift I call “peacocks to penguins.”) Page 99 shows how this physical transformation happened on the body. By shrouding the legs and obscuring the groin with dark wool, the suit hid both physical vulnerability and overt sexuality. In its place, the suit projected an image of rational, democratic, and disembodied authority. The book argues that this shift wasn't just a matter of changing aesthetic tastes; it was a powerful political maneuver. The dark suit became a visual shorthand for civic virtue, helping to naturalize white male power by making it look inherently stable, unremarkable, and "plain."

Page 99 is also a good demonstration of my overall methodological approach. By combining my two decades of experience as a theatrical costume designer with traditional historical archives, I wanted to uncover the material reality of how these clothes actually fit, felt, and functioned. The page proves that the ubiquitous black suit was actually a radical, highly constructed political tool, built stitch by stitch and seam by seam.

Visit Chloe Chapin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah M. S. Pearsall's "Freedom Round the Globe"

Sarah M. S. Pearsall is an award-winning historian with degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge, where she taught for nearly a decade. She is a professor in, and soon to be Chair of, the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. She wrote her new book, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, as both a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and Distinguished Fellow in the American Revolution at the British Library.

Pearsall applied the “Page 99 Test” to Freedom Round the Globe and reported the following:

Page 99 of Freedom Round the Globe focuses on the strategies of the royal governor of Virginia, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore to win popularity in the 1770s. Dunmore had few supporters in Virginia in 1774, given that he represented the British crown in a period of rising protests and that he was a member of a detested minority (Scots), to boot. In a bid to increase his popularity, he brought his wife and children to join him: a time-honored strategy to humanize politicians. He also started a war against Indigenous Americans, notably Shawnees, in order to placate settlers eager to move west into Indigenous homelands. This dark, not to say cynical, strategy resulted in Dunmore’s War in 1774, which even some Virginians at the time saw as a political ploy. Neither strategy worked for Dunmore, and the human costs were significant, especially for Native Americans.

Page 99 here is representative of the book in its linkages between events in the “thirteen colonies” and those in a wider world. Every chapter of the book starts outside the thirteen colonies in order to offer a new perspective on central ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. Page 99 is in Chapter 4, which begins in Edinburgh, Scotland, with an all-male debating society allowing women to join its audience to discuss happiness and other major topics. There is, then, a thread about Scotland and its connections with the American Revolution, shown here in the discussion of Dunmore. The book also considers consistently the fraught and often violent relations between settlers and Indigenous nations, as in this consideration of Dunmore’s War.

This section also sets up an examination (in the next chapter) of Lord Dunmore’s proclamation in November 1775, once fighting had begun. He offered freedom to enslaved men who fled their masters in order to take up arms for the British. In the eyes of Americans such as George Washington, such a move turned Dunmore from an unpopular governor into a villain. Virginia enslavers saw this decision as abject treachery, and it made some join the rebellion. It also meant that many more enslaved people fled to British lines to win freedom: an irony considering American Patriots considered themselves the defenders of liberty.

So, the Page 99 Test works here in showing global connections and in terms of setting up critical connections between the American Revolution, slavery, and settler violence.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Polygamy: An Early American History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cameron Seglias's "Settling Debt"

Cameron Seglias is Assistant Professor of American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Settling Debt: Antislavery and Colonial Crisis, with the following results:

Page 99 analyzes several passages from the fascinating eighteenth-century Quaker Ralph Sandiford, an antislavery writer who is still not well known outside of specialist circles. In these passages, Sandiford reflects on the corruption of religious and political elites who profit from racialized slavery and the traffic in enslaved Africans. As I put it on page 99: “Sandiford’s point is that the ‘unrighteous’ enslaving ministers that ‘teach, or oversee, or discipline the Church...have lost their Savour of the Gospel.’ And as long as they continue to ‘preach to others, they...become Castaways, and draw their Flock with them to Perdition.’” In order to resist these enslavers, Sandiford felt that he must make his testimony public through printing his antislavery books. Like others before him (including John Milton), Sandiford believed in the centrality of press freedom for democracy and self-governance.

I still remember working on earlier drafts of what would eventually become page 99. There was something even then that made this page feel particularly dense to me. Perhaps this is because a number of central ideas of the book—especially around questions of religious and political authority—are knotted together in the material that is quoted and analyzed on this page. In other words, page 99 probably is not the best browser’s shortcut for my book, if only because too much context is needed to understand what is being said on it.

Even while I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book, the chapter of which page 99 is a part could serve as an entry into the book. The writer I focus on in that chapter (Ralph Sandiford) is a kind of key to unlocking the main arguments and themes of Settling Debt. It was while working on Sandiford’s writing that I figured out what my book is really about. I can sum this up in a quote from his work, in which he says that being involved with racialized slavery makes one a “Debtor and Oppressor in the Creation.”

Learn more about Settling Debt at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert K. Brigham's "This Is a True War Story"

Robert K. Brigham is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam.

Brigham applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam, and shared the following:

On page 99, my adopted sister and I are discussing our adoptive mother and her expectations that I make something of myself. She had a dim view toward men in general and she wanted me to be that rare exception...a good man.

Page 99 certainly deals with one of the many complicated relationships I had in my life as an adoptee, but it does not capture any of the major themes of the memoir. I would say that the Page 99 Test fails.

This memoir is about poverty, adoption, families, and war. It is about my lifelong search for my biological family, ending with the discovery that my biological father had been a major influence on my life without my knowing it.

Learn more about This Is a True War Story at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel N. Jones's "Falling Fast"

Daniel N. Jones is Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada Reno (UNR) and core faculty within the Interdisciplinary Social Psychology Program. His research explores the psychology of romantic attraction, deception, and personality--particularly emophilia and the Dark Triad traits--and how these forces shape behavior in contexts ranging from relationships to the workplace to cybersecurity. With a unique blend of scientific rigor and real-world relevance, Jones brings fresh insight into the emotional patterns that define how we love, trust, and connect.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Falling Fast: The Perils and Possibilities of Emophilia, and reported the following:

Page 99 defines emophilia again, which is the tendency to fall in love easily and often. Page 99 articulates how individuals high in emophilia are overly optimistic about how their relationships will turn out, making or loving unrealistic statements like “I will always be here for you.” The page further discusses how these statements are made in earnest and not manipulative. Even though individuals high in emophilia are often unfaithful, they care about their partner, they just find themselves torn between an old flame and a new passion. The chapter also differentiates emophilia (the tendency to fall in love easily and often), with polyamory. Polyamory is where someone maintains more than one love interest in several co-occurring relationships. It is possible that for a person in a polyamorous relationship, the simultaneous love interests may have taken a long time to form and this type of romantic attraction may not happen often. Individuals high in emophilia are beholden to their romantic emotions and often have a tough time deciding between multiple love interests and relationship options. They are in particular drawn to chance encounters and romantic narratives.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well. I would say readers get a good idea of emophilia. They would get a basic and foundational idea of what emophilia is, an idea about what it is not, and see some unique features of this individual difference.

This page not only defines emophilia as the tendency to fall in love easily and often, it explains how they are unrealistic in their relationship perceptions. They believe they will love someone forever, when most evidence points to a pattern of frequently finding someone new. This unrealistic optimism about a relationship lasting forever is not manipulative, it is self-deceptive. The page also differentiates emophilia from relationship styles like polyamory. Someone can be high in emophilia and engage in polyamory. But someone may have only fallen in love twice, those love interests took a long time to develop, and they happen to have occurred at the same time in a polyamorous relationship. In such cases, the person may be polyamorous, but not high in emophilia. The page concludes with a statement about how romantic notions of “chance encounters” leading to love is popular with those high in emophilia as are the idea of “being there forever” for someone.

Visit Daniel N. Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Douglas's "Protecting Minds"

Thomas Douglas is Professor of Applied Philosophy and Director of Research at the Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford. He trained in clinical medicine (Otago) and philosophy (Oxford) and works chiefly in philosophical bioethics and neuroethics. His research has focussed especially on the ethics of using medical and neuroscientific technologies for non-therapeutic purposes, such as cognitive and moral enhancement, crime prevention, and infectious disease control. He is the author of over 130 academic articles or chapters and has led two major externally funded research projects: 'Neurointerventions in Crime Prevention: An Ethical Analysis' (Wellcome Trust, 2013-2019) and 'Protecting Minds: The Right to Mental Integrity and the Ethics of Arational Influence' (European Research Council, 2020-2025).

Douglas applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Protecting Minds: The Right Against Mental Interference, with the following results:

A reader who opened my book to page 99 would find themself in the midst of a discussion of what makes a mental state 'important'. The page starts with me suggesting that a mental state might be important because many other mental states depend on it. My belief that the scientific method is a reliable guide to the truth is an important mental state because of the pervasiveness of its effects on the rest of my mental life. But, I go on to suggest, a mental state can also be important because simply because I identify with it in some way, or ascribe it great importance. My attachment to a long deceased friend might be important because I regard it as such, even if it exerts very little influence on the rest of my mental life.

Why am I interested in the importance of mental states? Because my book examines the ethics of interfering with others' minds, and I think that the wrongness of a mental interference may depend on the magnitude of the interference, which may in turn depend on the importance of the interfered with mental-states (rather as the wrongness of a privacy breach might depend on the severity of the privacy breach, which might in turn depend on the sensitivity of the information that is revealed). In the second half of page 99, I turn to consider the question of whether, when assessing the magnitude and wrongness of a mental interference, we should take into account knock-on effects. Suppose you are feeling down, I slip a mood-boosting drug into your coffee, and you feel less gloomy as a result. Moreover, partly as a result of your diminished gloom over the coming days, you begin to develop a passion for model trains. On my view, the magnitude and wrongness of this interference will depend on how important your feeling of gloom was. But does it also depend on the importance of your passion, or lack of passion, for model trains? I am not sure, but that's the question I'm raising here.

Would a person who read only page 99 get a good taste of my book? Boringly, my answer is: in one way, 'yes', and in another way, 'no'. I am guessing a typical reader of this page might think something like: the questions here are interesting, but the style of the answer is dry and pedantic. That's probably a good reflection of the whole book--read it only if you like dry and pedantic! But the reader of page 99 finds themselves in the midst of a discussion that is in many ways a tangent, or at least, is not part of the main thread of the book's argument.

The book's main argument is for the view that all of us possess a right against interference with our minds--analogous to the better-accepted right against interference with our bodies--and for a particular account of the scope of this right. On the account I defend, we are wronged not only by drastic forms of mind-control, like the covert administration of mind-altering drugs, but also by some of the more familiar forms of influence or manipulation that we are repeatedly exposed to online.

Learn more about Protecting Minds at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amelia Frank-Vitale's "Leave If You Can"

Amelia Frank-Vitale is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Princeton University. An anthropologist of migration and violence in Central America and Mexico, Frank-Vitale has documented the dangers facing people migrating across Mexico and the strategies they develop – including coming together in caravans – to manage those risks and defy restrictions on movement. Her new book, Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds, examines how Honduran youth navigate life after deportation, illuminating the changing nature of deportation as a consequence of the externalization of borders and connecting regimes of mobility control - and the creative ways people challenge them - across scale and space.

Frank-Vitale applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds, and shared the following:

Page 99 includes this quote, first in Spanish, then in English:

Si a mí, un niño me dice, “Profe, yo me voy,” yo lo que puedo hacer es tomar su mano, si tengo dinero, dárselo, decirle que le vaya bien, que Espero que Dios lo cuide, lo guarde en ese camino, y que llegue. (If a child comes to me and says, “profe, I’m leaving,” all I can do is take their hand, if I have money, give it to the, wish them well, and say that I hope that God protects them and takes care of them on this journey and that they make it.)

The Profe here is a teacher at two elementary schools in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. He makes multiple appearances in the book, but the scene on this page is of a day I spent with him during which he was participating in a government-NGO pilot program to teach children about the dangers of migrating, aimed at reducing out-migration. Page 99 begins halfway into another lengthy quote in Spanish, but the English is there in full, telling me how he feels about having to participate in these activities:

“I’m giving this talk here, telling the youth not to go. But this is a hypocritical talk, I feel like a hypocrite… the government comes and says to me, give this talk so the children don’t migrate. But what opportunity does the state give to this child? There is no opportunity. I feel like a hypocrite…You can tell people that they are going to get taken by the Zetas. You tell them that they’ll fall from the train, that they’ll lose a leg. You tell them that in the United States they are going to be in prison… but the people say I prefer that to staying here… I go because in Honduras they chop people up, they leave them in sacks along the side of the road… How am I going to tell a young person not to migrate, with what moral authority?”

This quote, on this page, is a remarkably fitting condensation of the themes this book addresses: young people growing up in a Honduras surrounded by the ever-present possibility of extreme violence and a negligent, abandoning state; youth leaving Honduras, again and again, and knowing exactly why they are leaving without imagining that migration will be easy or safe; and, finally, that the punitive and violent immigration enforcement of the United States does not deter people from trying to get to the place where they feel like they’ll have a better chance of making the life they want for themselves. There are other dynamics also present in the book – the nature of border externalization, the history and impact of migrant caravans, the relationship that gangs have to neighborhood-by-neighborhood territorial control, the ordinary violence of mass deportations – but the core argument of the book is that deportation produces more movement, not less. Page 99 captures both that essential assertion and the way in which it is grounded throughout the book in the close up, fine grained ethnographic field work I did in San Pedro Sula.

Another aspect of the book that this page brings out: the interspersing of the original Spanish quotes followed by their English translation. Though this is not necessarily standard form for books like this, I wanted to retain the Spanish for two reasons. First, I think it’s a way of bringing more readers with varying degrees of bilingualism more directly into the social worlds depicted in the book. Then, while all the fieldwork for the book was conducted in Spanish, it is not my first language. I wanted to ensure that Spanish-speakers, especially Honduran Spanish-speakers, could access the words and stories in the language in which they were spoken as much as possible. We carry a lot of responsibility to tell the stories that are entrusted to us in the most responsible way possible; including the original words, as I did with the Profe on page 99, is one way I try to do that.

Visit Amelia Frank-Vitale's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gautham Rao's "White Power"

Gautham Rao is a historian of American law and politics, and an Associate Professor of History at American University in Washington, D.C.

His first book, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (2016), tells the story of how the Founders created the federal government after the American Revolution.

Rao applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, White Power: Policing American Slavery, and reported the following:

Page 99 takes us to the heart of chapter 5, "Nat Turner's America," with a brief discussion of Turner's religious motivation for attacking the enslavers in Southampton Country, Virginia; before then moving into a paragraph describing his planning, escape, and attack. The final paragraph on page 99 then addresses the enslavers response: to deputize whiteness by exhorting white men to take up arms, either via the militia or on their own.

With the description of enslaved rebellion and white deputization and policing, there's no page that better captures the essence of this book. The book builds an argument about how enslaved people's resistance and rebellion pushed white enslavers to create a policing system built around white vigilance, deputization and government institutions. On page 99 we see a transformative moment and each of the key elements in the story.

Who has the right to violence? The book takes us back to a world where whiteness was like an officer's badge, and in which the white population gave itself extraordinary policing powers over enslaved and free Black Americans. Enslavers were chiefly worried about rebellions, or what they called insurrections, that would lead to racial apocalypse. Over several centuries, they acted on their fears to build a sprawling police state consisting of empowered white vigilance and government forces like slave patrols and militias. The system survived the Civil War and Reconstruction, and only slowly gave way to the new racism of modernized policing by the end of the 19th century.

Visit Gautham Rao's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kira Ganga Kieffer's "Unvaccinated Under God"

Kira Ganga Kieffer is visiting assistant professor of religious studies at Fairfield University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, with the following results:

From page 99:

Fear about girls’ sexuality, purity, and the sanctity of girlhood spread much further than it might have seemed from Gardasil’s media coverage during its first decade on the market. The fact that only two states mandated HPV vaccination for school attendance and that less than half of adolescent girls and boys completed the three-shot vaccination protocol were evidence of Gardasil’s fraught nature, even among doctors…New groups utilized Christian beliefs and rituals to express vaccine hesitancy, but the Gardasil case was not fundamentally more or differently religious than the prior cases in this book.

Page 99 concludes the chapter about Gardasil, the first vaccine marketed to consumers (adolescent girls), which prevented against strains of HPV. Of all the chapters in my book, this one is the least like the others! This is because it focuses on conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians who opposed the morality of this vaccine when it came out in 2006. These groups are traditionally religious and their opposition to Gardasil was driven by a desire to retain strict norms about gender and sexuality.

The majority of Unvaccinated Under God is about how Americans who have been vaccine hesitant have expressed themselves religiously in a very broad sense that is not specific to a well-recognized tradition. I would have to give the Page 99 Test a fail in terms of providing a representative window into my main arguments or evidence. I will say that the Gardasil case study is fascinating and contributes to the book’s thesis, which is that Americans use vaccines as a proxy for larger cultural and religious anxieties.

Visit Kira Ganga Kieffer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Hales's "Vital Ties"

Molly Hales is a medical anthropologist and physician at the University of Chicago. Her work centers on mediation, intimacy, and medicine.

Hales applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Vital Ties: Digitally Mediated Intimacies with the Dead, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Mapping the Dead

When we were together, Erin was constantly checking the GPS map on her smartphone to see where we were, to figure out what was nearby, to pull up directions, and to check the traffic on the bridges going into and out of San Francisco. Her sense of space seemed to be just as anchored to the two-dimensional location of the glowing blue dot on Google Maps as it was to the three-dimensional space we occupied. I was sympathetic, if occasionally annoyed. Although I had been a late adopter of mobile phones and an even later adopter of smartphones, I have since become utterly reliant on my phone’s GPS.

The way that smartphones track and display a user’s movements made them particularly appealing to Erin as a tool for registering her encounters with her mother. She told me,

A place will trigger an event, and there’s a part of me that’s like, “Oh I want to memorialize it, I want to plant a flag in my little app.” I mean it’s not a physical flag, in the world, but I want to plant a little flag that says, “My mom was here.” I mean I called them mom sightings! That’s how I’d use it in this geographical way, like I was hunting. And I was seeing her in the world. And that felt really important.

By recording where each of her sightings took place, the app created a cartography of memory. Erin even told me that she had been searching for a way to display her entries on a map, organized spatially rather than chronologically.

Erin was also careful to point out that this was an intersubjective cartography, charting out her mother’s location in relation to her own. She went on to say, “I wanted to plant little flags, for myself, but at the same time I also recognized, this is how I’m experiencing this space. It’s not necessarily a property of the space on its own, it’s a property of me in the space.” Her entries described her relationship to various places, experienced through her memories of her mother. But the entries also described her mother’s relationship to these same places, experienced through Erin. When Erin said, “I want to plant a little flag that says, ‘My mom was here,’” she was not describing places that her mother frequented while she was alive, but places where she encountered her mother after her death. Patricia had a relationship to these places by way of Erin’s own encounters with them.

Furthermore, Erin clarified that the term “mom sightings” was not meant to suggest that she was encountering an independent entity. She explained,

And so when something got triggered in the environment that gave me a memory of her, it was a “mom sighting,” but was it really her? It’s my memory of her, it’s how I relate to her. And so it’s more of a reflection of my relationship, and ... the interconnection between us.

Page 99 offers a glimpse into the text as a whole, though the argument itself is something of a tangent. The page begins with a fresh section of text, which makes page 99 feel less fragmented than I would have expected given the nature of the exercise. I’m not sure how to feel about that, since part of what I write about in the book is the promise of fragments and fragmentations. I want to suggest that fragments can anchor intimacies with the dead as well or better than cohesive identities, or the fullness of representation.

At any rate, this particular section hones in on the spatial aspects of haunting, showing how offline spaces are intertwined into digital practices of communication and communion between the living and the dead. The specific point that I’m making here about mapping the presence of the dead is not one of the key arguments of the book as a whole, but it does open out into many of the book’s key themes. The concept of an “intersubjective cartography” helps shift attention to the centrality of the relationship between Erin and her late mother. This is one way that I hope to conjure the dead throughout the book, by allowing them to live on through the relations that they sustain with others, rather than through digital tools or new technologies that promise to capture and preserve the deceased in perpetuity.

The page’s emphasis on place is also appropriate given that my initial idea was to study “online homes for the dead.” I thought of these as quasi-geographic sites that had been carved out for the dead to reside. There are examples in the book of people creating such “homes” for the dead using digital technologies, including a heavenly virtual reality island where a dead man awaits his adult son’s visits, and the online memorial where a young British woman spends time with her best friend, who died from breast cancer almost twenty years ago.

Most of all, I hope my readers come away with a sense of the richness of 21st- century ways of being with the dead, digital practices that co-exist with other types of practices that invigorate intimate relationships across deaths’ divide.

Learn more about Vital Ties at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roy A. Meals's "Ligaments"

Roy Meals, MD, is an orthopedic surgeon and a clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of Bones: Inside and Out and Muscle: The Gripping Story of Strength and Movement.

Means applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Ligaments: Appreciating the Bands That Bind Us, and reported the following:

Ligaments has nine chapters, and the fifth one is titled Growth, Damage, Repair. It runs from page 90 to 102. On page 99 I describe phases two through four of wound healing, which is integral to understanding how nearly all tissues heal from injury. We have some intuitive understanding of the phases from watching skin abrasions, cuts, and incisions heal. Phase one (page 98) is where a blood clot forms to stop the bleeding and to initiate the chemical and cellular cascade that leads to phase two, inflammation, characterized by marked tenderness, swelling, warmth, and redness. Phase two may continue for 10 days and overlaps with phase three, repair, which lasts as long as three months. It begins by sealing the skin and continues with prolific scar formation causing the wounded area to become thickened and raised. Phase four, remodeling, overlaps with the third phase and lasts six to twelve months. During this time, the wound softens as the scar matures, the redness resolves, and near normalcy returns.

At the bottom of page 99 I write, “Nearly all ligaments heal by going through identical phases that I have described for skin where the process is easily visible. The same occurs unseen for muscle, intestine, liver, bladder, and every other tissue except bone.”

Hence, the material on page 99 is in the dead center of the book and is critical to understanding how ankle sprains and torn ligaments from head to toe heal. Leading up to this, Chapters One through Three provide the approach to this summit by describing ligaments’ discovery and their myriad functions. Chapter Four clarifies this key connective tissue’s molecular and cellular organization, which brings us to Chapter Five and the epitome on pages 98 and 99. Then on the “downslope,” Chapters Six and Seven describe common injuries, most notably ACL tears that plague many athletes, followed by other conditions, including hyperlaxity syndrome and cellulite. Chapter Eight covers ligament maladies in other animals, famously ACL tears in dogs and lameness in horses. Chapter Nine closes the book with discussions of extraordinary ligaments, such as those in contortionists, in individuals who have had artificial replacements, and exciting advances on the horizon.

Ligaments is for general readers who are curious about science and medicine--its history, present state, and future possibilities. It is intentionally non-technical and filled with case examples and analogies to make the learning palatable, even fun. So by no means is page 99 characteristic of the book’s overall light-hearted approach to the subject, yet the material it contains is critical to the overall understanding of these bands that bind us, and somebody has to do the heavy lifting. That’s page 99.

Visit Roy A. Meals's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom French's "The Gap Years"

Tom French is a lifelong mountaineer, cross-country skier, and lover of the outdoors. A senior partner emeritus of McKinsey & Company, he is currently board chair of the Trustees of Reservations, a director of Corning Incorporated, and serves on several other nonprofit boards. He lives in Massachusetts, with his wife, Jill.

French applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Gap Years: Climbing, Skiing, and the Journey Back, his first non-business book, with the following results:

From page 99:

Meanwhile, I had been fine-tuning other aspects of my health preparations. Ever since returning from Aconcagua, I had wondered why, after performing strongly lower on the mountain, I had been so acutely affected by the altitude on summit day. This prompted a memory from years earlier on Denali, when our team had passed through the fourteen-thousand-foot camp on the West Buttress the day after summiting via the West Rib. A high-altitude research team, set up in a park rangers’ tent, had asked to measure our blood oxygen levels, starting with the team member who had dealt best with the altitude up high. I was flagged as that person. Yet, when our oxygen levels were compared, mine was by far the lowest. It was a curiosity that I didn’t dwell on at the time. Now, preparing to head to Everest, where performance at extreme high altitude would be crucial, I tried to connect some dots.

When I first heard about the Page 99 Test, I was excited at the prospect of applying it to The Gap Years. When I flipped to the page to see what awaited me, I was disappointed to find it less representative of the book than hoped. The page describes dealing with various personal health issues as I prepare for the first of two attempts to climb Mount Everest. One of these is trying to obtain a Covid vaccination before departure, just as the vaccine is becoming available to the general public. Another is reconciling my blood oxygen levels at various altitudes with my actual performance at those altitudes. The majority of the book contains accounts of expedition travel, cross-country ski racing, and mountaineering worldwide, interspersed with reflections on spiritual fulfillment found in the outdoors and contemplation of the pursuit of life meaning. Page 99 is far less lyrical. Just practical details. Not the book’s best foot forward.

That said, page 99 has its place in the book, and it is indicative of an important sub-theme of The Gap Years: the interplay between physicality and spirituality. The book describes journeys to the summits of the world’s highest mountains, in a quest to embrace spirits rarely encountered. These outward journeys are powered by inward journeys of preparation, to restore a sixty-year-old body to top physical condition, and to prepare for extreme athletic challenge. The physical journeys are not only practical, but also in their own way spiritual. For someone whose youth was defined by endurance training, returning to it was a voyage of rediscovery and deep meaning. As meaningful in many ways as the summits themselves.

Some of my favorite passages in the book describe the interplay between physical activity and the natural world: the “Zen-like exchange of moist breath and frigid air” while ice climbing, or, while cross-country skiing, “feeling the freedom of moving swiftly through crystalline winter beauty, of pride in one’s body, of sharing the experience with close friends." These moments, verging on spiritual, depended on my body being able to perform at an extremely high level; something that can’t be taken for granted in one’s sixties. Climbing high mountains at this age also has unique risks. Death rates on Everest increase markedly for climbers over sixty. There were many reasons why getting practical health details sorted out was important.

In summary, page 99 of The Gap Years is not particularly gripping, and is not indicative of much of the broader focus of the book. But it refers to some practical details that really mattered, and it hints at an inward journey that is central to it.

Visit Tom French's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sally Shuttleworth's "In Quest of a Cure"

Sally Shuttleworth CBE, FBA, is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, and the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. She has also taught at the universities of Princeton, Leeds, and Sheffield. She has published extensively on literature, science, and medicine: previous books include The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (2010, winner of the British Society for Literature and Science Prize), and the co-authored work Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019).

Shuttleworth applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort, and shared the following:

On page 99 we encounter Robert Louis Stevenson as a young man – an aspiring writer, but in ill- health. He was delighted when he was ordered by his doctor to spend the winter in Menton on the French Riviera, and explicitly without his over-anxious parents. On arrival, his elation turns to despair as his body refuses to obey his commands – he fears he may be dying. On moving hotels, however, his spirits lift when he meets a Russian child, ‘a little polyglot button of a three year old’ who initially pronounces him to be a mädchen (or girl) due to his long hair. He is soon spending all his time with her and her family, playing games, and at one point spending an entire afternoon ‘washing Nellie’s dolls with her’.

Stevenson’s ‘delight in children – their joy in life, their creativity and imaginative seriousness – which emerges in much of his later work stems from this period. Later that year he publishes ‘Notes on the Movements of Young Children’ which uses Nellie’s dancing to analyze why we find the somewhat graceless movements of young children so lovable. The attraction, he suggests, is in sympathy, as you ‘see her struggling to find expression for the beauty that was in her against the inefficacy of the dull, half-informed body’. Stevenson is fascinated by what he sees as ‘this war of intelligence against the unwilling body’. He aligns the position of the child, struggling to express herself, with that of the invalid, and also the artist. The page concludes: ‘The child is thus a figure for both the invalid and the artist, and in her sheer joy in life, and determination to overcome the limitations of her body, she clearly became for Stevenson a model for how to transcend the confinement of an invalid identity.’

I was delighted to find that page 99 is an excellent entry point for the book. In Quest of a Cure pursues the lives and writings of various invalids sent into medical exile in Europe by their doctors, roughly in the period 1860-1930, and this example illustrates how closely medical experience and literary writing were intertwined. The findings were often unexpected – in this case, Stevenson’s alignment of the young child, artist, and invalid. Much of the book looks at a period before sanatoria emerged, when invalids lived largely in hotels, and moved around freely; they also often brought their families with them. One theme that emerged during the writing of the book was the position of children in these resorts, accompanying their parents, or indeed suffering themselves. Such strange lives they lived: joyful, and cosmopolitan, as we saw on page 99, but also framed by the presence of disease and death.

Stevenson is one of the various invalids I look at who visited both Menton, and its subsequent, snowy, counterpart, Davos, in the Swiss Alps, where walks on the beaches and into the hills were replaced by vigorous skating and tobogganing, which Stevenson adored. When he arrived in Davos, he was accompanied by his new wife, Fanny, and stepson Lloyd. Lloyd later recalled that he had enjoyed his time in Davos ‘the tobogganing, the skating, the snow-balling’, yet it was a place where ‘half the population … were coughing away the remnants of life’. Stevenson himself became almost as famous for being an itinerant invalid as for his writings, as this 1955 advert for Guinness suggests:

The book follows Stevenson from Menton and Davos, to Bournemouth, and Saranac Lake in NY State, before his subsequent voyages to the South Seas and Samoa (accompanied by his family and redoubtable, widowed mother).

Stevenson is only one of many travellers for health in the book. Others include John Addington Symonds (who made full use of the sexual freedom afforded by his move to Davos), the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and in the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield and Thomas and Katia Mann. By focusing on two resorts, Menton and Davos, I am able to explore the intersections of lives in these self-declared ‘English Colonies’; the changing patterns of treatment, from balmy seaside to snowy Alps, and from hotels to sanatoria; and the highs and lows of medical exile, for patients, their carers, and their families.

Learn more about In Quest of a Cure at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Bryce's "Grounds for Exclusion"

Benjamin Bryce is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches courses on Latin American and global history.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Grounds for Exclusion: Race, Health, and Disability in Argentine Immigration Policy, 1876–1932, and reported the following:

Page 99 finds itself early in the section "Calculated Risk in a Racialized World." It examines the Punjabi labourers who arrived in Argentina in 1912, arguing that their journeys were the product of a mix of poor information and calculated risk regarding racism and economic prospects across the receiving societies. The page draws on memoirs (Totaram Sanadhya's account of a group of 46 Punjabis in Fiji trying to reach Argentina), interviews in the Buenos Aires Herald, and consular correspondence to show migrants paying their own fares, following kin, demanding protection from the imperial state, and acting on information that travelled by letter from a small group of Punjabi agricultural workers in northern Argentina.

The Page 99 Test works pretty well. Chapter 5, in which page 99 sits, is a microhistory of the 1912 Punjabi arrivals, set against the broader economic and diplomatic entanglement of Argentina and Britain on the eve of the First World War. The chapter argues that both worker agency and state efforts to halt mobility shaped this episode. A browser landing on page 99 catches the chapter’s broader focus on migrants as decision-makers weighing race, empire, and economic opportunity. What the reader would miss is the architecture around this microhistory: the book examines South Asians alongside Chinese, Japanese, Roma, Ottoman subjects, and eastern European Jews, and traces health and disability exclusions as well.

Grounds for Exclusion challenges the long-standing image of Argentina as a nation of open-door immigration. Between 1876 and 1932, Argentine officials built a long list of formal and informal grounds for refusing entry — based on race, health, and disability — that deterred many from ever boarding a ship. The inclusion of millions of Europeans was predicated on the exclusion of others.

Visit Benjamin Bryce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Quigley's "The Man Behind the Cane"

Paul Quigley is the James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War History at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Humanities and Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. He is author of the award-winning Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-65 (2011).

Quigley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War, with the following results:

The Man Behind the Cane tells the story of Preston Brooks, the South Carolina congressman who infamously caned Senator Charles Sumner in the US Senate chamber in 1856. Brooks’s bloody attack came in response to Sumner’s speech criticizing slavery and insulting one of Brooks’s relatives.

Page 99 comes partway through a section exploring the aftermath of the caning. It begins with a Senate speech delivered by South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, the relative whose honor Brooks was trying to defend when he assaulted Charles Sumner. Butler defended Brooks, as one would expect. Yet, interestingly, he did so with some equivocation, describing his younger kinsman as being “quick to resentment.”

The page then discusses various incidents showing that Brooks was “still spoiling for a fight” after the caning. For example, when he encountered Massachusetts Congressman Calvin Chaffee in a Washington hotel, he threatened to “whip him on suspicion of his having denounced his conduct … he wanted to whip a few more of the Mass. Men.” Around the same time, Brooks was writing letters to other northern politicians who had condemned the caning, strongly hinting that he would be willing to engage in duels with anyone who decried his bloody assault on Sumner.

The Page 99 Test does indeed reveal some of the major themes of the book. It features our protagonist, the man behind the cane, at his fieriest—demonstrating that the caning was no aberration in his life. Readers will also find on page 99 backward glances to the caning itself, which is of course the centerpiece of the whole book. On this page I note that as Andrew Butler delivered his speech, in the same room as the assault, listeners were undoubtedly thinking of the earlier attack. I speculate that “perhaps splashes of blood remained there, camouflaged by the crimson red carpet of the Senate chamber.”

In discussing Brooks’s willingness to engage in duels with his critics, the page also invokes something explored at length in the chapters on his early life: the fact that Brooks felt an obligation to follow the strictures of the slaveholding South’s culture of honor and manhood, even though his efforts to do so were often incomplete, or misguided, or in some way dissatisfying.

Finally, in touching on Brooks’s post-caning conflicts with northern politicians, page 99 gestures toward the broader political ramifications of the caning, which I emphasize in the latter part of the book. Not only did the caning nudge Americans one step closer to the Civil War, it also catalyzed a transformative public debate about free speech and political violence.

Of course, readers must read the whole book to properly understand Brooks’s motivations for the caning, which stemmed in large part from his frustrating experiences with violence as a young man, including his failed attempt to fight in the Mexican War. They must also read the rest of the book to appreciate the far-reaching impact of the caning on nationwide debates around slavery, free speech, and the rightful relationship between rhetorical and physical violence. But for just one page, page 99 actually does a pretty good job of introducing the main themes and characters of the book!

Learn more about The Man Behind the Cane at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue