Carrie Vaughn's "Kitty and the Silver Bullet"

Carrie Vaughn is the author of four novels about a werewolf named Kitty.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to the latest installment in the series, Kitty and the Silver Bullet, and reported the following:

My one-sentence tagline description of the Kitty series is this: Kitty is a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Kitty and The Midnight Hour is the first novel in the series. The fourth, Kitty and the Silver Bullet, came out earlier this year, and the fifth and sixth will be out early next year.

Kitty and the Silver Bullet wraps up a lot of threads that developed through the first three books. The overall arc of the series is something of a coming of age story. Starting with the first book, Kitty learns to stand up for herself, and to be independent. In Silver Bullet, she comes full circle and confronts some of the people who have threatened her and abused her in the past. Now, she has the skills and strength to be able to stand up to them.

Page 99 has one of my favorite scenes in the book. Kitty is a rather unusual werewolf in that she tries to avoid violence. She prefers to talk her way out of situations whenever possible. But by now, it's becoming clear that that isn't going to be an option this time around. Because she's facing down a whole group of werewolves and vampires, all of whom have it in for her, her werewolf strength and abilities aren't going to be enough to protect her. So, her friend Ben is going to teach her how to shoot a gun.

"What's this?" My voice seemed small.

"Nine-millimeter Glock semiautomatic, weapon of choice of law enforcement officers everywhere. Compact, light, has some kick because of that, but it's worth the trade. It can still do a fair bit of damage."

Dread fell like a weight over me.

He continued. "We're not strong enough to take on Carl and Meg hand-to-hand. We need other advantages."

Like hell. "Ben, no, I've never touched a gun in my life--"

"That's why I'm taking you to a range where you can practice."

"No. No no no. It's cheating..."

I like this scene for a lot of reasons. We hardly ever see this kind of character--the kick-ass heroine--actually learning how to shoot. You can't just pick up a gun and be good at it, and I wanted to show that. It's also a fun bit of interaction between two of the series' main characters. Both of them are snarky and funny, and watching them together is a hoot. I have a lot of fun writing scenes with Kitty and Ben.

All in all, this really is pretty representative not just of the book, but of the series. There's a hint of menace--Kitty is learning to shoot because her life is in danger. But the humor and character interaction, which I like to think are some of the strengths of the series, come through as well.

Read an excerpt from Kitty and the Silver Bullet, and learn more about the author and her work at Carrie Vaughn's website and journal.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rick Shenkman's "Just How Stupid Are We?"

Rick Shenkman is the editor and founder of George Mason University's History News Network, and author of the recently released Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to the new book and reported the following:

My book flunks the p. 99 test. All readers will get by dipping into the book on that page is a discussion of the shallowness of TV. This is not breaking news. What is, then? My book argues that we are ignoring a 10 alarm fire: the gross of ignorance of millions of Americans about politics, best summed up by the fact that a majority believed on the eve of the Iraq War that Saddam was behind 9-11. (50 % continued to believe this even after the 9-11 Commission definitively reported that he was not.) How can you have a healthy democracy when a majority are so ill-informed about the central issue of our time?

Watch a video and read more about the book and author at the Just How Stupid Are We? blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Thompson's "Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All"

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous journals, including American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History, Australian Literary Studies, and in the 1999, 2000, and 2006 editions of Best Australian Essays.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story, and reported the following:

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of two peoples: New Zealand’s indigenous Polynesians (the Maori) and the Europeans (principally British) who colonized them. But it is also the story of two individuals, one Maori and one American, whose experience both mocks and mirrors the history of encounters between these two groups. The key to the book is the oscillation between these two subjects, and on page 99 we find one of the many shifts between past and present that are intended to illuminate this relationship.

My husband (who is Maori) and I have just arrived in America, and I am seeing him for the first time in the context of my parents’ house.

I had never seen Seven before in an environment like this, dressed in his suit or a charcoal sweater, his hair now long and tied back in a ponytail, his skin a dusky brown from the summer we had just left. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of him against the plum-colored linen velvet of my mother’s sofa, the corner of a saffron cushion peeking out from behind his back, the big red Japanese painting on the wall behind him, and think, my God, it’s an Ingres.

The chapter examines one of the most persistent ideas about Polynesians, i.e., that they were a species of Noble Savage. And it was prompted by certain (to me humorous) similarities between my husband’s initial experience of America and that of Omai, a Raiatean native from the Society Islands (now French Polynesia), who was brought to England by Captain Furneaux in the late 18th century.

There was some initial anxiety that I might be misconstrued as representing the man I married as a sort of elegant, genial “natural gentleman.” But my point was rather that this was an astonishingly easy thing to do—even for someone like me who knew better. It was not simply that my husband manifested many of the same qualities as Omai (good humor, politeness, modesty, charm), but that everyone who met him was so ready to see him in this light. And the question was, therefore, not so much what this said about him as what it said about us.

Read excerpts from the book, and learn more about the author and her work at Christina Thompson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marek Kohn's "Trust"

Marek Kohn is a fellow in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex and in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton. His books include Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind, and A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination.

He summarized the applicability of “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good--"I wouldn't start from p99 to explain what Trust is all about!"--and reported the following:

Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good (Oxford University Press) proceeds from basics – what trust is, how it arises, what it implies – to civics, society and the common good. On page 99 it’s in transit, taking the reader into a chapter, The Goodwill of the People, about trust between states and citizens. The introductory example is that of a Czechoslovak jazz musicians’ organisation which emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, subverting the communist authorities’ attempts to keep civil society as small and over-controlled as possible. Although this particular group made the most of its opportunities, the suppression of civil society by Soviet-bloc regimes has left a morbid legacy of distrust. Similar legacies can be seen in other societies which have been ruled in the past by regimes which distrust the people, or seek to maintain their power by sowing division among their subjects. Under such circumstances, trust is often confined within families, creating clannish societies in which community is hobbled by suspicion. It often seems that if the state will not trust the people, the people will not trust each other.

They may also not trust each other if they feel they are different from each other. As the political scientist Robert Putnam acknowledges, and has found in his own studies, research tends to show that diversity inhibits trust. But that isn’t a law of human nature. If people decide that it is in their interests to co-operate, and they manage to do so successfully, they will come to trust one another. As trust develops, so does community. People achieve more together, and they gain more quiet enjoyment from their everyday encounters with each other. But where there are differences among them, they may have to work to create a new shared culture. And they have to want a diverse society to work – unlike, it seems, many of those who seize upon evidence that resolving difference can be difficult to claim that there is no point in trying. Whoever said human relationships are easy?

Page 99 of Trust:

the goodwill of the people 99

supposed to be channels through which the Communist Party could organize, discipline, and shape the people. They were part of the state apparatus, whose purpose was to ‘build socialism’. The difficulties experienced in this project led, however, to a brief period in which many of the tenets of the Leninist system were thrown open to question, offering the vision of ‘socialism with a human face’. After five months of this ‘Prague Spring’, Soviet-led forces crushed the reform movement in August 1968.

Attempting to restore the status quo ante, the new satellite regime decided that Czechoslovak social organizations had become too independent-minded to be brought to heel, so it disbanded them and set up new ones. In 1971, a group of jazz enthusiasts applied to the Ministry of the Interior for permission to form a jazz musicians’ union. The ministry officials turned them down, but recommended that they join the new Czech Musicians’ Union. Two crucial lapses gave them a degree of associational freedom markedly greater than they were supposed to enjoy. First, the Musicians’ Union misinterpreted the Ministry, which had intended that the jazz musicians join as individuals, and allowed them to set up their own Jazz Section. Second, the Ministry was not given the power which it normally exercised over social organizations to appoint the Section’s chair.2 The authorities did, however, impose a limit on the number of people who could enter the association, as if it were a bus.

The new Jazz Section set to work exploiting the limited trust placed in social organizations by the state. Since such associations’ interests were assumed not to be of wider interest...

Read an excerpt from Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good, and learn more about the book and author at the Oxford University Press webpage and Marek Kohn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ekaterina Sedia's "The Alchemy of Stone"

Ekaterina Sedia's is the author of the critically-acclaimed The Secret History of Moscow.

In her new novel, The Alchemy of Stone, "Mattie, an intelligent automaton skilled in the use of alchemy, finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict between gargoyles, the Mechanics, and the Alchemists. With the old order quickly giving way to the new, Mattie discovers powerful and dangerous secrets-secrets that can completely alter the balance of power in the city of Ayona. However, this doesn't sit well with Loharri, the Mechanic who created Mattie and still has the key to her heart ... literally."

Sedia applied the “Page 99 Test” to the new book and reported the following:

This is page 99 of the ARC of The Alchemy of Stone. It is shockingly representative of the book, because this paragraph serves to illuminate the ambivalent relationship between Mattie, the intelligent automaton, and her creator Loharri. Here it is, in a nutshell:

She realized that her feet, of their own volition, were taking her to Loharri’s house. It was only natural, she supposed—she passed this market so many times, up the slight incline of the ancient hill eroded almost to nothing, to the white house almost hidden by overgrown rose bushes. Loharri paid little mind to the plants now that Mattie who had planted them wasn’t there to take care of the succulent green growth that seemed to become more audacious with every passing year. Ten years since she first planted the roses, and now they were taking over, erecting themselves into a formidable hedge. The first pale and red blooms studded the thorny branches, a decoy of beauty hiding their murderous intentions. Mattie imagined that one day the plants would take over the house and bury Loharri within ... she could almost live with this thought, if it weren’t for the key he wore around his neck.

Learn more about the book and author at Ekaterina Sedia's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Choate's "Emigrant Nation"

Mark Choate is a history professor at Brigham Young University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad, and reported the following:

I’m honored to submit to the 99th-page test, because I’d known about it before my book was published. I decided, this will work out, I just need to make that page really great! But I quickly found that through formatting and page corrections, page 99 is really a random slice of the book. This is a test you can’t prepare for.

As it happens, Page 99 of Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad is the next-to-last page of Chapter 3 (“Migration and Money”). Other chapters in the book deal with ethnicity, language, culture, diplomacy, imperialism, and contemporary comparisons. Page 99 discusses in detail how emigrants chose their destinations, and how the Italian government and the Catholic Church attempted to influence them and steer them in different directions. Here I’m getting into how Italian emigration worked in its peak years (1880-1915), not just as the influx of Italian immigrants into the United States with which Americans are familiar, but as Italians choosing where to go and what to do upon arrival. The Italian government had a vested interest in return migration and remittances, and invested a great deal in the statistical collection and analysis of emigration. Data on charity cases in the early twentieth century revealed

“that the richer and healthier Italian emigrants chose to go to North America instead of South America. Many migrants who would have been rejected by United States inspectors emigrated to South American ports instead, only to find more miserable economic opportunities than back in Italy. They eventually returned home, broken and disgraced.”

Italy’s Liberal government had taken a laissez-faire approach to emigration, while improving emigrants’ status abroad through diplomatic channels and a wide range of subsidies. Because of its mixed results, this policy was controversial in Italy and abroad:

“Critics reasoned that if migration to the Americas had infected and ruined so many lives, without providing the wealth which emigrants sought, surely emigration itself represented a national disaster. Emigrants’ best interests, and Italy’s best strategic interests, were vehemently debated. The Catholic group Italica Gens hoped to steer emigrants toward Brazil and Latin America because of greater possibilities for Italian political influence, even when the United States offered more opportunities for workers. Some imperialists still hoped to limit American migration to help the development of Eritrea and Somalia.”

The anti-emigrant campaign in Italy overlapped with the anti-immigrant campaign in the United States. For example, Adolfo Rossi, himself a former emigrant and a Liberal anti-imperialist, tried to balance domestic and international political pressures in his work as Italian consul:

“Another controversy, which pitted emigrants’ economic interests against foreign policy, was the debate over rural or urban colonization. Emigrants made higher wages in cities and in mines or factories, gathered together in tightly-knit communities; but was this in their best interest? American politicians railed against the crowding of foreigners in big cities and called for immigrants to settle and cultivate the Great Plains. Adolfo Rossi, as inspector for the Emigration Commissariat and later as Italian consul in Denver, Colorado, obliged American authorities by encouraging Italians to settle in the West rather than on the eastern seaboard. In 1905 and 1906, during an official tour, Rossi emphasized to the American press that Italy did not encourage emigration, did not advise Italians to congregate in cities, and did not oppose emigrants’ Americanization. Rossi personally believed this to be the best policy, and it was certainly what Americans wanted to hear.”

And this is why the choice of destination was so politically sensitive, in addition to economic and social ramifications. More than half of Italian emigrants returned to Italy, so their experience abroad affected Italy directly. If emigrants settled in neighborhoods or “colonies” in big cities (New York, Boston, Buenos Aires) they could form a large and powerful group, but might adopt urban vices. If they settled in rural “colonies,” supposedly they would maintain rural values, religiosity, and loyalties.

“Some Italians cited the colony of Tontitown, Arkansas, as a model Italian settlement under the leadership of Father Bandini, a Scalabrinian priest. Far from the evils of urban tenements, filled with disease and immorality, here Italians worked the fields under the watchful care of their parish priest. Most emigrants ignored this official advice and settled in Italian American urban communities, rallying together against religious and ethnic prejudice. In the long run, this was a wise economic decision.”

In truth page 99 is fairly representative of my book’s tone, approach, and subject. I’ve performed the random sample test on Ford and other writers – he passed, and some have failed.

Read an excerpt from Emigrant Nation, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press webpage and Mark Choate's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barry Siegel's "Claim of Privilege"

Barry Siegel, a Pulitzer-Prize winning former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, directs the literary journalism program at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of six books, including three volumes of narrative nonfiction and three novels of legal suspense.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets, and reported the following:

My book, Claim of Privilege, chronicles how the deaths of three civilian engineers in a mysterious 1948 Air Force plane crash led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision recognizing the “state secrets” privilege. What drew me to this story were, in part, the important national issues: This state secrets privilege now gives the government unbridled powers—whenever it invokes national security concerns—to conceal conduct, withhold documents, block litigation, wiretap and jail people without due process claims. Yet what equally attracted me were the personal tales about ordinary citizens whose lives intersected for a time with those of the country’s most powerful leaders. The meshing of the private and public: Here was history writ both small and large.

On p. 99 of Claim of Privilege, we see the personal up close. Patricia Reynolds, just 20, has lost her husband of two years, Bob Reynolds, in the plane crash—he was one of the three civilian engineers. In shock, she has retreated to her mother’s home in Indianapolis. She is about to stir, about to seek redress, about to launch the litigation that would lead to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. v Reynolds. But not yet. She remains, on p. 99, in a fog.

Patricia Reynolds could recall nothing about the first few days after the crash. Phoning her mom, meeting at the Georgia airport, contacting Bob’s family—she had blacked it all out. Pat remembered being in a hotel room the first night. The next thing she remembered was the funeral in Springfield, Massachusetts.
That funeral. Yes…Pat recalled standing with Bob’s brother Dick and her cousin Jim. They were on the veranda. Talking and laughing. Pat was saying, I can’t believe we’re laughing...I can’t believe there’s still laughter in us….

Pat had [another] memory of that day: up on the hill, the cemetery. Trees, lush foliage—a beautiful sight. For a girl from Indiana, hills were incredible.

Pat could not recall retrieving Bob’s possessions. What had happened to Bob’s trombone…?

On the next page in my book, a lawyer from Philadelphia will call Pat. She will resist at first, then agree to join a lawsuit against the government charging negligence. During discovery, the government will refuse to hand over the Air Force accident report about the plane crash. A federal district judge and an appellate panel will side with Pat and the other widows, but then the Supreme Court, in March 1953, will reverse those judges, ruling that the government need not turn over the accident report. So came formal recognition of the state secrets privilege—with profound consequences ever since for our country.

Yes, the meshing of the private and public, that’s what drew me to this story. That, and the chance to evoke a time and place in our country’s history that seemed to resonate today. I wanted to set my particular tale against the context of the time, as a way to understand what happened back then—and what was happening now. By evoking the past, I aim to illuminate the present.

Read an excerpt from Claim of Privilege, and learn more about the book and author at Barry Siegel’s website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Santlofer's "The Murder Notebook"

Jonathan Santlofer is the author of several novels and a highly respected artist whose work has been written about and reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, and Arts, and appears in many public, private, and corporate collections.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Murder Notebook, and reported the following:

In this case, Ford Madox Ford may be right. Page 99 in The Murder Notebook is the first page of Chapter 16. Not many chapters open with one of my sketches, but this one does: a man, dead on the floor, gun in hand, blood pooled around his head. My police sketch artist, Nate Rodriguez, has just discovered the body, accompanied by a rush of emotions: shock, guilt, and suspicion. He'd been tailing the guy for a few days, but now he's too late. The scene suggests suicide, but Nate's not sure. The one thing he is sure of is that the two murder cases he's been investigating are linked - something the police department does not want to hear. Trying to prove that connection is going to set Nate on a circuitous path which will bring him up against the NYPD, the FBI, and finally the U.S. government. In other words, big trouble for Nate!

Read an excerpt from The Murder Notebook, and learn more about the book and author at Jonathan Santlofer's website. View the video trailer for The Murder Notebook.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ted Botha's "The Girl with the Crooked Nose"

Ted Botha's first book, Apartheid in my Rucksack, was a personal account of discovering Africa as a white African. His book Mongo, Adventures in Trash deals with the people in New York City who collect what others consider garbage. With Jenni Baxter, he wrote The Expat Confessions, about the trials and tribulations of South Africans who live abroad.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Girl with the Crooked Nose: A Tale of Murder, Obsession, and Forensic Artistry, and reported the following:

On page 99, we meet the girl with the shattered head. She's been killed with a blast from a shotgun to the face, and Frank Bender has to piece together the 300 bits of her skull before he can start sculpting a face onto it. He's never done anything like this before – gluing together the puzzle of a skull - but he knows that if he doesn't do it no one else will. This is America of the ’80s, and forensics is a young science. Who, if anyone, puts skulls back together again? Frank, as in everything else he does in forensics, feels and intuits his way with this case, first reconstructing the skull, then putting a face on it. For him, getting an identification of a victim is the main reason he became an amateur sleuth to begin with – to see justice done, a victim ID’d, a murderer caught. The girl with the shattered head is as good a case as any in the book - and I deal with many cases that Frank has gotten involved in since 1977 - to show the kind of intuition, artistry, and sense of the macabre that it takes for him to imagine the faces of murder victims or of fugitives who've been on the run for decades. Moreover, these are all his training for the big case of his career, in 2003 – the murders of the women in Juarez, Mexico.

Read an excerpt from The Girl with the Crooked Nose, and learn more about the book and author at Ted Botha's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Walter Nugent's "Habits of Empire"

Walter Nugent is Tackes Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion, and reported the following:

Habits of Empire has a very simple thesis: that our relatively easy and astonishingly rapid acquiring of a continental empire from Atlantic to Pacific between 1782 and 1848 instilled in us, as a people, the bad habit of empire-building. After we acquired California and Oregon in 1848, we kept on going across the Pacific and around the Caribbean, creating our second, offshore empire, and since 1945 we’ve been building a third one, military and economic, around the world. The book focuses chiefly on constructing the first, continental, empire, when in successive episodes the U.S. gained title to land, then removed or repressed the previous occupants, and finally settled it. It’s the historical foundation of our present imperialism.

Page 99, early in my discussion of how we acquired Florida, is very representative of that process. Florida was the third of our continental acquisitions (the first and second were Transappalachia in 1782 and Louisiana in 1803). How we acquired it from Spain, then prostrate and powerless from Napoleon’s invasion, involved filibusters in both West and East Florida covertly supported by the Madison White House; demographic invasion of Americans from neighboring slave states; military conquest (without a declaration of war) by Andrew Jackson, “the American Bonaparte;” and unparalleled chutzpah from Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in his defense of Jackson and in negotiations with Spanish envoy Luis de Onís. The Adams-Onís Transcontinental Treaty of 1819 gave the United States not only the Floridas but also a boundary line along the 42nd parallel all the way to the Pacific, for the first time. Spain’s grip began weakening in 1795 thanks to incompetent rulers in Madrid disregarding the pleas of Spanish governors on the ground. American uprisings began in what is now the Louisiana Panhandle in 1810, extended along the Gulf coast and East Florida from 1811 on, and along the way brought about the defeat and dismemberment of the Creek nation.

The chapter (#4) which includes page 99 is entitled “Florida, 1810-1819: Southward Aggression I” (II being California and New Mexico, discussed later). Page 99 includes a subtitle, “The First Nibble: West Florida, 1810-1813,” and from there the page reads as follows:

By 1810, the Louisiana Purchase was seven years old, and Anglo-Americans clearly dominated the government, commerce, and population of New Orleans, St. Louis, and the riverine settlements in between. The U.S. Census in that year found 77,000 diverse people in the Territory of Orleans (soon to become the state of Louisiana). Thousands of white, free black, and slave refugees from war-shredded Haiti and Santo Domingo swelled the city and the land around the great river as far north at Natchez and beyond. In adjacent parts of the United States, the 1810 census counted 262,000 in Tennessee, 407,000 in Kentucky, 252,000 in Georgia, and 40,000 in the Mississippi Territory, which included present Alabama – and none of these figures included Indians. The Creeks alone numbered over 15,000, most of them living along the Alabama and Chattahoochee Rivers.

The whites and blacks, moreover, were newcomers. Georgia and the Mississippi Territory, Tennessee and Kentucky, and, west of the river, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri were all places where slavery flourished and where the influx of settlers multiplied state populations by three, six, even twelve times in a decade. These were frontiers of settlement, southern-style, filling up with new people unknown in Europe since the Middle Ages, if ever. Whoever was already there was under severe pressure to get out of the way. There was no time for assimilation and in any case it was not wanted, since the “whoevers” were Indians and free blacks, and, in the Floridas, the Spanish.

The governors and garrisons of Spanish Florida had been aware of this population onslaught since at least the 1780s……

Read an excerpt from Habits of Empire, and learn more about the book at the Knopf website.

--Marshal Zeringue