Emily Martin's "Bipolar Expeditions"

Emily Martin is professor of anthropology and a member of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. Her books include Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS and The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture, and reported the following:

In writing Bipolar Expeditions, I thought of the book like a house with many windows through which readers could look at moods, mood disorders, and bipolar disorder in particular. Pg 99 of the book opens one of those windows, beginning a chapter that explores how psychiatrists learn to diagnose bipolar disorder in "affective disorder rounds." Rounds is a teaching setting in which a patient who has been admitted to the hospital with mood problems is "presented" to a group of medical students. In that chapter, we see how fuzzy the lines between different mood disorders are and how difficult it is for psychiatrists and medical students to decide among alternative possibilities. We also see how patients contest the doctors' efforts to extract information from them, which they anticipate will be used to diagnose them in ways they might not appreciate.

By looking through the other windows in the book, the reader will be able to trace the processes by which a psychiatric diagnosis, like the mood disorders in evidence at Rounds, has emerged into a wide territory beyond psychiatry.

Anyone, from a reader of a teen magazine to a high powered CEO, might regularly chart their moods to determine whether they have a “mood disorder.” Workers undergo training in how to be "manic" so that they can recreate “manic” states – high energy, no sleep, innovative thoughts -- later in the workplace. Hollywood actors show up at their psychiatrists’ offices with their agents in tow, the agents’ job being to make sure that any drugs the doctors prescribe will not take the edge off the actors’ “mania.”

Both depression and mania have become fascinating cultural symbols in schools, the workplace and the market place. The low end of the mood spectrum (depression) signifies failure and unproductivity; the high end (mania) signifies creativity and productivity. Bipolar Expeditions argues that mania and depression have a cultural life outside the confines of diagnosis, that the experiences of people living with bipolar disorder belong fully to the human condition, and that even the most so-called rational everyday practices are intertwined with irrational ones.

Read the introduction to Bipolar Expeditions and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Porochista Khakpour's "Sons and Other Flammable Objects"

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1978. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Johns Hopkins University writing seminars MA program. Her writing has appeared in the Chicago Reader, The Village Voice, nymag.com, Paper, Nylon, Gear, Alef, Bidoun, and nerve.com, among other publications.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects, and reported the following:

Page 99 raises my own eyebrows just for the fact that three characters are involved. Although there are many relationships in my novel, I give pretty one-on-one treatments of each, whether between an immigrant husband (Darius Adam) and wife (Lala), a very Iranian father (Darius again) and his reluctantly Iranian-American son (Xerxes), a struggling New York transplant 20-something-of-color (Xerxes again) and his half-white trust-fund-armored girlfriend (Suzanne). In my mind, much of the novel carries on intimately with characters immersed in moments of watching the second hand in bad hours in dark bedrooms, the tense rides home with a burnt-out father, the silent dinners where the TV would do the talking for a young boy and his mother, the strange and sweet solitude of the many hours of being nowhere but 30,000 feet up in the heavens, the desperate conjuring of memory after memory when you haven’t heard a human voice — including your own — in days....

Rather, Page 99 is set in a loud parking lot, featuring Lala at the onset of her “getting a life” phase (what she regards as her period of eager assimilation to American and even Angeleno life), with Sons-supporting characters: Gigi, the Mexican housekeeper and local busybody of the Southern California apartment complex (Eden Gardens) where the Adam family lives, and Marvin, her affable African-American gay friend. They form a sort of odd trinity with Lala in being her first friends in America and they take her out to pizza parlors, Hawaiian-themed bars, blockbuster movies marathons, etc. She’s pretty hesitant at first, but because she is having trouble breaking out of housewifedom, she slowly begins to look forward to their “nothing nights” out:

“It was a nothing night, nothing much but eating and drinking and talking, and, of course, laughing — she laughed at jokes or sentiments she didn’t understand, or fake laughed at things she did get but couldn’t really get a real laugh out of, or when she felt the urge to put something into the group dynamic where she couldn’t fit words — Oh, never mind, she thought again and again; she was grateful for this life she had gotten.

It happened that one evening when she strutted out of the house in her jeans, into the parking lot, Gigi’s busted Honda was not there to meet her. Rather, there was an SUV, pulsing with a low bass, presumably from a sound track, hinting of a night out. Inside, a man — dark, obscured by tinted windows, just a silhouette of a large man in his large car — waved at her. She stood frozen, terrified, tried to ignore the driver who had undoubtedly mistaken her. The car honked. She closed her eyes, hoping it would go away. She heard the buzz of rolled-down automatic windows, and the familiar call, “Hell, Lala, it’s me, girl!”

It was Marvin. She was relieved, and yet ... not relieved at all. He had never picked her up. She had never seen his car. In fact, he knew nothing of her pact with Gigi and their secret outing agreement — hence the blasting of music and honk and holler.

She waved back hesitantly, and he laughed and honked again, motioning her in. She walked reluctantly over, worried that Darius might somehow psychically or just plain physically discover her secret in an incarnation she never anticipated....

Inside, Marvin was laughing to himself and shaking his head at nothing at all. “Hello, Marvin,” she shouted...”

This first time Lala encounters Marvin solo results in a long outing to Marvin’s favorite “2-for-1 Sushi Nite,” where she tries sushi for the first time. This chapter (“Heavens”) explores race and culture quite a bit and so the episode ends in some unlikely bonding after getting through that rather cringey tale that Lala — a bit drunk — suddenly launches into: the first time she encountered a black person, several years back.

The whole chapter toys with racially-bewildering icons, from the Iranian’s scarlet-suited merry Nourooz mascot — the black-faced tambourine-playing herald Haji Firooz who ushers in Persian New Year — to the book’s celebrity muse fixture, bubbly “I Dream of Jeannie” ingenue Barbara Eden. In fact, I have to confess my interest in this chapter’s, say, Southern California “local color turned Technicolor” at one point made me actually contemplate calling the book Black Santa, Blonde Genie! I suppose other priorities to the plot prevented me from going there, but there is something to it.

Read an excerpt from Sons and Other Flammable Objects at the official book website, and visit Porochista Khakpour's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

McDonagh and Pappano's "Playing With The Boys"

Eileen McDonagh is Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. She is the author of Breaking the Abortion Deadlock. Laura Pappano is the author of The Connection Gap and an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and The Washington Post. Their new book is Playing With the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports.

Pappano applied the "Page 99 Test" to Playing With The Boys and reported the following:

In Playing with the Boys, Eileen and I try to make a point we think is obvious, but that riles people: Sports are not just for guys, not just for fun, and not just so much background yammering (though sports talk radio sure sounds that way), but a social force that doesn’t merely reflect sex differences, but imposes them.

When I applied the Page 99 test to the book, I landed under “Sex Authenticity.” I’m not sure it reveals “the quality of the whole” but it gets at two central ideas. The first is how itchy “sex” issues make people who want strict gender roles and rules. The second is that we’re still debating the same issue, but now it's sports instead of jobs.

In this section, we explore the shock in the 1970s when courts decided companies couldn’t any longer have sex-segregated job ads under headings like “male” and “female.” Just before this, we give space to “the bunny problem” – as a 1965 The Wall Street Journal article puzzled over what would happen now that males and females had to be given equal access to job opportunities. The writer fretted about a “shapeless knobby-kneed male ‘bunny’ serving drinks to a group of stunned businessmen in a Playboy Club.” The writer also envisioned “a matronly vice president gleefully participating in an old office sport by chasing a male secretary around a big leather-topped desk.” (Did this stuff really happen?)

We offer a fly-over of the government’s struggle to figure out when sex does (and doesn’t) matter. They came up with the Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ) with “Sex Authenticity,” the escape clause that let employers hire women only or men only for certain jobs (think wet nurse). Today, the look back is amusing, revealing – and relevant to the debate about when an athlete’s sex should (or shouldn’t) matter. Why don’t super-power-kicking female athletes become punters and field goal kickers? Why are there different rules for males and females when it’s not about physical difference (men go to 15 in badminton and women go to 11?) Why does Rutgers charge $7 to see men’s soccer and $4 to see women’s (when they’re not trying to make money)?

Just like when the boss could demand a “Gal Friday” but not a “Guy Friday,” we have gender equality work to do in our athletic in-box.

Learn more about Playing With The Boys at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary McKinney's "Slipknot"

Gary McKinney is a technical writer, rock 'n roll musician, and the author of Slipknot.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the novel and reported the following:

Reading page 99 of a book will reveal the quality of its whole? Bulls*it! How could it possibly? But I read page 99 of Slipknot anyway and found the statement to be more true than I would have expected. Slipknot is a mystery novel whose main character is both the county sheriff and a Deadhead. As a genre piece, there are certain expectations a writer must meet: a strong furtherance of plot, the creation of tension, and the revealing of character. All these points are found on page 99, where Sheriff Gavin Pruitt finds himself in the midst of a plot development (pressure to solve the crime); tension (a friend's betrayal); and character development (Pruitt's feelings expressed).

So, yes, to some extent the quality of Slipknot can be gleaned from page 99. What a reader will not find is any sense of setting. The forests and farmlands, salt and fresh water, mountains and beaches are missing completely. Missing, too, is the heart of the book: Sheriff Pruitt's reliance on the lyrics and social perspectives of the Grateful Dead to make meaning of both his personal and professional life.

Nevertheless, the page 99 test appears to have some validity -- if not also a degree of glibness. For instance, if page 100 were read, the quality of writing would also be revealed, with the focus shifting to the elements of place and setting. If page 101 were read, the quality would again be revealed, with the focus this time on the Grateful Dead aspect of the book. Nonetheless, Ford's idea is not as much bulls*it as one might think. Page 99 may or may not be the fulcrum of a book, but it certainly should stand up to a close reading.

Read an excerpt from Slipknot and learn more about the novel at the Kearney Street Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Coyne's "After War"

Christopher Coyne is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at West Virginia University and author of the new book, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to After War and reported the following:

In After War, I explore the constraints facing attempts by U.S. occupiers to “export” liberal democratic institutions abroad. I focus on two broad categories of constraints. The first category consists of constraints that are “internal” to the country being occupied. This includes such things as culture, historical experiences, and so on. The second category consists of “external” constraints, which are outside the country being occupied. One example of an external constraint is the U.S. political system, which directly influences the nature and dynamics of foreign occupations. In many cases the U.S. political system generates perverse outcomes in foreign interventions.

One specific aspect of the U.S. political system, which I analyze, is the various agencies and bureaucracies involved in foreign occupations. These bureaucracies often face competing goals and agendas that contribute to the failure of reconstruction efforts. On page 99 of After War, I note:

Michael Scheuer, in his analysis of the current effort in Afghanistan and the larger war on terror, has highlighted the tensions between the missions of the CIA and the FBI. As Scheuer notes, “At the most basic level, the FBI is meant to enforce U.S. law…The CIA, on the other hand, is authorized to break the law to gather information that helps defend the United States.” Note that it is the clash between missions that leads to these outcomes and not the malevolence of those within these organizations. Members of each agency pursue their respective missions, which do not mesh with the ends being pursued by the other.

Likewise, the journalist Robert Dreyfuss has documented battles between the Pentagon and the CIA as the U.S. prepared to go to war with Iraq.29 The main tension was between those in the Pentagon who supported the war effort in Iraq and those in the intelligence agencies who were largely opposed to the invasion.

David Phillips, who was involved in the early stages of planning for a post-Hussein Iraq, notes that during the postwar reconstruction efforts, “Relations between the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the State Department became increasingly acrimonious. U.S. officials vied for control over the Iraq policy.” Similarly, Larry Diamond, who was also involved in the reconstruction of Iraq, indicates that “A number of U.S. government agencies had a variety of visions of how political authority would be reestablished in Iraq...In the bitter, relentless infighting among U.S. government agencies in advance of the war, none of these preferences clearly prevailed.”

In theory, the various agencies and bureaus in the U.S. government will work together in efforts to “export” liberal democracy abroad. However, in reality, the incentives facing bureaucrats often lead to conflicts between departments and agencies which actually contribute to the failure of such efforts.

Read Chapter One from After War and learn more about the book at the Stanford University Press website.

Find out more about Coyne's research at his website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kyle MacDonald's "One Red Paperclip"

Kyle MacDonald applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book One Red Paperclip: Or How an Ordinary Man Achieved His Dream with the Help of a Simple Office Supply, and reported the following:

Upon your request, I turned to page 99 of the UK version of my book, One Red Paperclip.

The page talked primarily about Tootsie Pops, Dalmatian dogs, and firefighters named Bobby. I think that pretty sums up the book One Red Paperclip, as I like dogs, and have actually met several people named Boddy. Also, Tootsie Pops are a delicious treat best enjoyed in the company of friends.

Read an excerpt from One Red Paperclip and visit the One Red Paperclip website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Aronowitz's "Unnatural History"

Robert Aronowitz, M.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society, and reported the following:

On P. 99 of my book, Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society, we are in the middle of a late 19th and early 20th century medical controversy. Who should make the cancer diagnosis, the surgeon or the pathologist? On what grounds? William Halsted, reviled today by many people today for his promotion of radical breast cancer surgery, argued that the surgeon should be in charge and that it should be diagnosed based on the look and feel of the tumor in the examining and operating room. “There is a gap between the surgeon and the pathologist which can be filled only by the surgeon,” he wrote in 1898. “A tumor on a plate and a tumor in the breast of a patient, how different! Its blood, its color, its form, its freshness, its consistency are more or less lost when the tumor is removed.” Halsted also argued that surgeons should be in charge because they were ultimately responsible for the patient.

While Halsted ultimately lost this seemingly narrow, technical debate – today cancer is defined and diagnosed by pathologists – the questions raised, like many other clinical issues in the history of breast cancer, are still with us and remain important to doctors and patients. What exactly is cancer? Who gets to decide? What are the consequences of one definition or another?

Cancer diagnosis remains an act of prediction under great uncertainty. Since Halsted, pathologists have defined cancer “earlier” in its natural history, creating different “pre-cancer” diagnoses which have some (constantly changing) statistical probability of causing harm in the future. These diagnoses often create terrible treatment dilemmas for both doctor and patient. What is their real clinical significance? Should they be ignored or treated?

The two most prominent pre-cancer diagnoses are lobular carcinoma in situ and ductal carcinoma in situ. These pre-cancer diagnoses increased an astounding eightfold between 1975 and 2002. This change has contributed to the widely touted and frightening 1:8 lifetime odds of developing breast cancer. The massive increase in breast cancer diagnoses, trumpeted in cancer education and awareness programs, has radically transformed how women perceive and react to this disease. Cancer fear is more widespread and intense. A recent scientific report showed that the number of women with breast cancer choosing a “preventive” mastectomy in the unaffected breast soared from 1.8 percent in 1998 to 4.5 percent in 2003. That’s an increase of 150 percent in just five years.

So who defines cancer and how we define it matters. I hope that my history of breast cancer in American society will empower doctors, patients, and lay people to see many present ideas and practices as not inevitable and therefore open to debate and change.

Read an excerpt from Unnatural History and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Marsh's "The Night Tourist"

Katherine Marsh is managing editor at The New Republic magazine in Washington, D.C., where she edits stories and essays on politics and culture. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times magazine.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book The Night Tourist, and reported the following:

The Night Tourist tells the story of Jack, a lonely 14-year-old Classics prodigy, who travels to the New York City version of the Greek mythological underworld to search for his dead mom. His guide is a 14-year-old ghost who calls herself Euri and on p.99 of my book, Jack and Euri are at the St. James Theater looking for a ghost who can help them named Edna Gammon. A performance of "The Producers" is underway before a packed house of both the living and the dead but there is a disruption: A ghost with a red bob takes the stage and begins to sing.

All around [Jack], ghosts began to grumble and shift. "Oh for God's sake," said the silvery-purple-haired old woman. "Do we have to hear The Merry Malones every night?"

"Edna, shut up!" shouted another.

Jack tugged on Euri's sleeve. "They said, 'Edna'! Do you think that's Edna Gammon?"

The silvery-purple-haired ghost leaned in between them. "You don't look like you've been dead long enough to remember Edna," she observed.

Jack noticed her giving him the familiar stare. "Well, I…I…wasn't. I just heard of her once."

"Once! You must know your theater. Most people haven't heard of her at all. She was the understudy for Polly Walker in The Merry Malones, back in 1927. Horrible musical. She died before she could take the stage."

"That may have been a good thing," Euri remarked as Edna fell to her knees screeching.

Suddenly, one of the living chorus girls tripped. "She's interfering with the performers!" someone shouted from near the ceiling.

Page 99 is an accurate snapshot of my book and its themes — it illustrates the way the dead and living worlds interact, integrates real New York City history (The Merry Malones was the very first musical to run at the St. James, then Erlanger's Theater), and shows the constant threat Jack is in of being discovered as a living boy in the underworld. Readers will judge quality for themselves but, for me, the page embodies the combination of page-turning plot, humorous and inventive world, and the integration of history, culture, and mythology, that I hope will make The Night Tourist as a whole an enjoyable read.

Listen to an excerpt from The Night Tourist, and learn more about the book and author at Katherine Marsh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronald M. Green's "Babies by Design"

Ronald M. Green is Eunice and Julian Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values and Director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford's "page 99 test" - "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you" - seems to work remarkably well when applied to my new book, Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice.

My theme on p. 99 is one of the most important of the whole book: that we are entering an era when the human genome has been converted into pure information: a sequence of DNA letters three billion units long. The symbol for this is the "$1,000 genome," which some researchers have promised will make its appearance as early as five years from now. It took ten years (from 1993-2003) and three billion dollars to sequence the first human genome, but automated sequencers are now being developed that will reduce that work to a matter of hours and a cost of around $1,000. What does this mean for the choices that face us?

For one thing, it promises a day when each newborn child could go home from the hospital with its entire genome sequence on a CD. This opens up the era of "personalized medicine," when many decisions about your health care will begin with a glance at your genome. Are you prone to colon cancer? Then start early with a diet high in fiber and low in food toxins. Do you have genes that make you less able to control alcohol? Watch your drinking, or consider one of the new anti-abuse medications likely to be available.

Because the same genomic information will be available at the gamete and embryonic levels, these possibilities also open the door to the genetic selection of our children's characteristics - the main theme of my book. Why should a child or adult spend a lifetime fighting obesity when her parents can either select an embryo with a more favorable DNA sequence or request a simple genetic fix that replaces the obesity-prone gene sequence with one likely to lead to a more balanced metabolism?

Of course, the possibility of embryo selection and gene modification raises many troubling ethical questions. Will gene selection deform parenting, replacing unconditional love with critical appraisal and pressure? Will it produce a "Genobility," as the rich not only get richer but physically and mentally stronger because they are able to buy better genes for their offspring? Does gene modification amount to an arrogant "playing God" that will only end by inviting divine wrath? These are among the questions I examine in this book.

Some fear that human beings' attempts to manipulate the genome will lead to a dangerous reduction in human genetic diversity. Will thousands of parents choose children resembling Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt? As attractive as this couple is, we risk human health and diversity if we create a "monoculture" of people with qualities that are deemed to be desirable from the limited perspective of our own age. Some also worry that by eliminating disease-related genes we risk losing valuable genetic abilities. The example I mention on p. 99 is sickle cell anemia which, though potentially lethal in its homozygous (2-copy) form, protects against malaria in its heterozygous (single-copy) form.

Here, I argue that the conversion of the human genome into pure information is one protection against this loss of human genetic diversity. We do not have to keep every variant of the human genome alive in some individual, especially if that variant causes disease, when it can be recorded as information for permanent storage and retrieval. We are now developing the ability to reproduce any sequence of DNA and insert it into a cell, sex cell or embryo. We do not have to perpetuate sickle cell to protect against a future malaria epidemic. Instead, we can call on our knowledge of the protective sequence to create new drugs or, if necessary, give our children the genes they need to survive and flourish in new environments.

I am no booster for human gene modification. This book is less an argument for it than an effort to show that panicked arguments against it are not as strong as they seem. Basing myself on a solid footing in the science and ethics of genomic research, I try to ease some of our fears and suggest that they derive from too strong a hold on the genetic status quo.

My brief argument on p. 99 epitomizes the direction of Babies by Design as a whole. Thus, it strongly supports "the page 99 test."

Read an excerpt from Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice, and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Davidson's "The Fighter"

Craig Davidson's stories have been published in The Fiddlehead, Event, Prairie Fire, and SubTerrain. His debut collection of stories, Rust and Bone, was called "remarkable ... challenging and upsetting, but never boring" by Chuck Palahniuk and "the best I've read in a long time from a young writer" by Bret Easton Ellis. He also writes horror fiction under a pseudonym.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his novel The Fighter, and reported the following:

I’m not sure if this maxim really applies to my book. Certainly it would to many and certainly, depending on what you take away from my book as a reader, perhaps, weirdly, pg. 99 is emblematic of the book as a whole. Pg. 99 concerns the backstory of one-half of the two sets of characters making up the narrative: in this case, the Tully family — brothers Reuben and Tom, and Reuben’s boy Rob — who live in the Love Canal district of Niagara Falls where Rob(bie) is training to become a boxer. Does it speak for the book in general? I mean, most of the reader reaction I’ve had, be it good or bad, is in reference to the fight scenes, one of which — the final match — goes on for some ten pages. Those are, I suppose, the “showpieces” of a book written by a fellow, me, when he was in his late-twenties and probably over-interested in really going overboard or being terrifically visceral or something ... which is going to appeal to some readers at least in certain frames of mind, as indeed such books often appeal to me. But pg. 99 is one of the softer portions of the book, so someone picking it up and reading only that page might come away with the mistaken assumption there is much cute and cuddly about the work — which, in point of fact, in this book specifically, no, there is not. Hopefully in later books down the line I will be able to find a finer and more temperate balance between viscerality and softness, but with The Fighter that balance is skewed.

Read more about the author and the novel at the official website for The Fighter and at Craig Davidson's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue