Angus Trumble's "The Finger: A Handbook"

Angus Trumble was born and raised in Victoria, Australia. He is a graduate of the University of Melbourne, and of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 1994–95. From 1996 to 2001 he was Curator of European Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, and since 2003 has been Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Finger: A Handbook, and reported the following:

I was not aware of Ford Madox Ford’s page 99 test, but in the case of my own new book The Finger: A Handbook (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) it seems to work nicely. My page 99 brings the reader into the middle of an extended, but hopefully fruitful discussion of old British nursery-rhyme naming conventions for the fingers that obviously relates to the more fundamental concept of learning to count, and count moreover to the power of ten—a habit that obviously came into being because of what primitive mankind discovered wiggling helpfully at the most conveniently proximate extremities. My page 99 is also picaresque, because among the rhymes is one that in the 1940s an old Englishwoman recalled her gloomy Scottish nurse reciting to her many decades earlier, in the flickering light of a candle: “Thumb, Black Barney; / Finger, Lope Dake; / Finger, Steel Corney; / Finger, Runaway; / And Little Canny Wanny who Pays All.” This and many similar rhyme schemes appear to account for the activities of four bucolic thieves, concluding with the little finger that almost always bears the cost.

My page 99 fits snugly into the early part of the fifth chapter (of ten, naturally, all of which shun footnotes). That chapter is entitled “The Finger and the Economy,” and in it I have some terse words to say about modern theft, and the present fiscal madness, but the book as a whole is about fingers in the broadest possible sense: about the nuances of gesture, about nonverbal communication, about finger imagery in art, and (inter alia) about fashions in gloves and colored nail polish—a phenomenon that crash-landed in the field of cosmetics in Paris in the 1920s, initially in the form of highly toxic green fuselage paint for aircraft. My first book, A Brief History of the Smile, began its life as a talk at a conference of dentists, but The Finger: A Handbook started off as a lecture for orthopedic surgeons. It is wayward, discursive, exploratory, and personal in outlook. I suppose I really wrote it as an entertainment, and I fervently hope that my readers will derive some enjoyment from exploring its digital byways. Why, for example, were the Victorians so obsessed by the concept of “filbert nails”? What is a filbert nail?

I should also mention that my page 99 is a beautiful page, set in magnificent Bembo, and brilliantly copy-edited for me by John McGhee, and designed (along with all the rest) by the estimable Jonathan D. Lippincott at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who clearly has the nimble fingers of a true artist.

Learn more about The Finger at the publisher's website and Angus Trumble's blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard H. Immerman's "Empire for Liberty"

Richard H. Immerman is the Edward J. Buthusiem Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow in History and the Marvin Wachman Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University. His books include John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy and The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz, and reported the following

My chapter “William Henry Seward Reimagines the American Empire,” begins on page 99. I’m fine with that. In a book that chronicles and assesses the evolution of the America’s empire by historicizing six of its architects, Seward emerges as perhaps the most complicated actor. John Quincy Adams is the subject of the previous chapter; if there is a hero to my story, he’s it. But he is a tragic hero. No one was a truer believer in America’s ideals, and no one advocated more fervently, or guided more expertly, the country’s expansion. Yet once Adams concluded that expansion served slavery, not liberty, he became empire’s most resolute opponent.

I introduce Seward as Adams’s disciple. He wrote a biography about his model and inspiration, dedicating it to the “friends of liberty and human rights throughout the world.” And in the run-up to the Civil War, Seward was among Abolitionism’s most eloquent spokespersons. In contrast to Adams, however, Seward refused to sacrifice empire to liberty—or the lack thereof. Throughout the 1850s he tirelessly promoted U.S. overseas expansion, primarily across the Pacific but also throughout the Caribbean and further to the south. Identifying America’s commerce as the “chief agent of its advancement in civilization and enlargement of empire,” he formulated a strategy aimed at America’s gaining control of “the commerce of the world, which is the empire of the world.” While the politics of Reconstruction consumed Americans after the Civil War, Seward schemed to extend US control—formally and informally—over Hawaii, the Dominican Republic, the Danish West Indies, and of course Alaska. He perceived no contradiction between empire and “liberty and human rights throughout the world.”

The juxtaposition of Adams and Seward is emblematic of the book’s overarching argument. My first empire-builder is Ben Franklin. The initial philosopher of an Empire for Liberty, Franklin saw the two concepts—Empire and Liberty—as mutually dependent and reinforcing. So did his fellow Founding Fathers, as do most Americans up to the present day. Yet U.S. history reveals that the liberty and empire were constantly rubbing up against each other, and they were often mutually exclusive. Situated within this context, my final chapter on Paul Wolfowitz and the Postscript on “the Dark Side” were the most challenging for me to write. That’s because at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo the rubber met the road: empire and liberty collided.

Read an excerpt from Empire for Liberty, and learn more about the book from the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sheena S. Iyengar's "The Art of Choosing"

Sheena Iyengar's innovative research on choice has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Security Education Program. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the Wharton School of Business, and Stanford University. She is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia University and a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award. Her work is regularly cited in such periodicals as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and TIME magazines, and in books such as Blink and The Paradox of Choice.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Art of Choosing, and reported the following:

The Art of Choosing is, of course, a book about choice, and one of its most important messages is that choice is more complex and multi-faceted than most of us realize. Every action we take in our lives can be considered a choice, and the choices we make today shape the choices we’ll have tomorrow. It would have been impossible to cover all aspects of choice in a single book, so I focused on exploring the questions that I found most thought provoking and most relevant to how we live. Why do we desire choice? How do we make our choices, and why do we sometimes choose against our own interests? What can we do in order to make better choices?

Since having a lot of choice can be overwhelming, I’m glad the “page 99 test” has saved me from having to choose which part of my book I should describe here. Page 99 in The Art of Choosing falls in the middle of a chapter on the role choice plays in helping us express and even create our identities. From a young age we learn to see the world around us through the lens of personal preference, and by understanding our preferences we make sense of ourselves and create a coherent picture of who we are.

However, though we may think of choice as an individual act, a way to distinguish ourselves, we do not choose alone. By this I mean that choice is a form of communication. Like body language, we generate it —sometimes consciously and sometimes not—and it sends messages to others. This can lead to a dilemma if, as our preferences change naturally over time, we begin to worry about sending mixed messages. We may feel torn between making new choices today and remaining consistent with the choices we made in the past, as I explain on page 99:

To behave in a way not in keeping with the identity that others have grown to recognize and love is to become unknowable or trustworthy. On the other hand, the world is an ever-changing place, and in being too consistent we risk becoming inflexible and out of touch. One high-profile example of this tension popped up in the 2004 presidential campaign. John Kerry’s candidacy was damaged by accusations of flip-floppery, whereas George W. Bush was admired by many for sticking to his guns. Once in office, though, Bush was criticized for parroting certain mantras with little regard for “the realities on the ground.” In his roast of the president at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, humorist Stephen Colbert “praised” Bush by saying, “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday—no matter what happened Tuesday.” It seems that you’re damned if you do change, and damned if you don’t. That’s what makes it so difficult to find the proper balance between consistency and flexibility.

One common, if perhaps not ideal, response to this dilemma can be seen in a study I conducted in collaboration with Rachel Wells, one of my doctoral students. We tracked hundreds of graduating college seniors as they went about looking for their first serious job, a major choice that would significantly affect their subsequent experiences and identity. As part of that study, we asked them to describe what they were looking for in their ideal job on three separate occasions over the six to nine month period it took them to go from initial search to successful employment. Each time, we asked them to rank the same 13 attributes of a job, including “high income,” “opportunity for advancement,” “job security,” “opportunity for creativity,” and “freedom to make decisions,” from most to least important. We looked only at new graduates, but all people, no matter where they are in their career, have to make trade-offs by considering these very attributes. Is it more important to have a job that’s personally fulfilling or one that lets you better provide for your family? Is it worth sacrificing job security for the chance to strike it rich?

We found that the students steadily changed their preferences over the months, becoming more pragmatic as they came closer to making a final decision, but this wasn’t the most interesting part. It turned out that the people who were happiest with their new jobs were also the people who didn’t realize that this shift in preference had occurred. They misremembered the past, believing that what they wanted now was what they had always wanted. Thus they were able to both satisfy their current preferences and maintain a narrative of consistency. In other words, to be happy with our choices, sometimes we may need to lie to ourselves.

Read an excerpt from The Art of Choosing, and learn more about the book and author at The Art of Choosing website.

See-Sheena Iyengar's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Morrisroe's "Wide Awake"

Patricia Morrisroe received a B.A. from Tufts University and an M.A. from NYU. She is the author of Mapplethorpe: A Biography and was for many years a contributing editor to New York magazine. She has written for numerous other publications, including Vanity Fair and Vogue.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia, and reported the following:

My book Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia is a first-person account of my struggle to “find” sleep, as well as a look at the many facets of the $24 billion sleep industry. Poor sleep runs in my family. Both my mother and maternal grandfather had insomnia, so I learned from an early age that sleep wasn’t a natural process but a gift from the fickle gods, who, at any moment, could snatch it away. Moving to New York after college, I lived in a series of increasingly noisy apartments and began to feel totally at odds with nature. I couldn’t see the sky from my windows. I hadn’t seen a moon in, well, a moon. I began to wonder if city living was contributing to my insomnia.

As part of my research, I traveled to Las Vegas, where I attended a continuing medical education course with 300 doctors. If New York is the city that doesn’t sleep, Vegas is the Village of the Damned – a neon metropolis that glows so brightly that its lights are visible from eight national parks. After spending nearly a week there, I didn’t know what day it was, or even if it was day. I felt incredibly unhealthy. Page 99 finds me sitting in a conference room at the MGM Grand Hotel listening to Dr. Fred Turek, a circadian biologist, talk about the research he’s conducted on the effects of sleep deprivation on mice. Not only did the mice get fat, but they developed diabetes and high cholesterol – symptoms seen in overweight people. His research is supported by studies done by Dr. Eve Van Cauter, who showed the effects of short-term sleep on healthy young men. After two nights of four hours of sleep, they had lower levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses appetite, and higher levels of ghrelin, an appetite stimulant. As Turek said in the lecture, he believes that one of our big problems is that we’re increasingly out of sync with nature – my feelings exactly.

Read an excerpt from Wide Awake, and learn more about the book and author at Patricia Morrisroe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Stansell's "The Feminist Promise"

Christine Stansell is the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her previous books include American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century and City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860. She writes widely about matters of feminism and American history in print and online, including for The New Republic, Salon, and The Daily Beast. Among other awards, Stansell has received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the Mary Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, and reported the following:

Open up The Feminist Promise to p. 99 and you have a story about a woman you never heard of, Belva Lockwood, and her machinations in the 1870s in Washington DC to catapult out of obscurity into the ranks of the movers and shakers. You see how hard it was for a woman to do anything besides toil in obscurity, and how hard she worked her connections to become (and you learn this on that very page) one of a handful of women admitted to law schools and then the bar, and then (and here's the kicker) the first woman to be admitted before the bar of the Supreme Court. Most of the book is about the twentieth century, so maybe it's not the best place to begin; but you do get a sense of the book's preference for odd characters and of my interest in writing about how politics shaped the fullness of lives. The Feminist Promise tries to make feminism a living, breathing, argumentative matter.

Read an excerpt from The Feminist Promise, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gabriel Cohen's "The Ninth Step"

Gabriel Cohen's books include the Edgar Award–nominated Red Hook. He has written for the New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

Cohen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new novel, The Ninth Step, and reported the following:

The Ninth Step, my fourth Jack Leightner crime novel, is coming out on May 25. I was glad to see what came up on page 99 for two reasons.

On that page, my protagonist, NYPD homicide detective Jack Leightner, and his partner Richie are talking to a Homeland Security agent named Charlson about a humble murder in a Pakistani deli in Brooklyn. Charlson informs them that their case may actually be connected to an incident in which pirates hijacked a ship in the Middle East. Here’s a snippet:

Richie interrupted. “Why wouldn’t the ship’s owners just go in and take it back by force? You said they were connected to the military, right?”

“Very simple: if the pirates were attacked, they could sink the ship. The potential loss might be much greater than the ransom demand. It’s a difficult problem.” Charlson sat back and steepled his hands together again. “Now, incidents like this are practically routine in the gulf—they get hundreds of pirate attacks every year. But what happened next was not routine. Not at all. While the Iranians were trying to decide what to do, the Somalis went poking around the cargo containers, just out of curiosity. After several days, some of them started to get very ill. They lost their hair and got mysterious skin burns. And then they began to die off, one by one.”

Jack whistled. “That wouldn’t be radiation sickness, by any chance?”

First, The Ninth Step is different from the other books in the series because it plays the mundane realities of daily life in Brooklyn against a wider international picture—it has a bit of a thriller element.

Second, it contains four fascinating real-life stories. Aside from this bizarre piracy incident in the Gulf of Aden, the story also deals with what happened to Pakistani-Americans in Brooklyn post 9/11, when the “War on Terror” devastated a whole thriving community. And another investigation in the book takes Jack back to his childhood in Red Hook and explores the world of the Italian mafia there in 1965—where, for example, the loan-sharking Gallo brothers briefly kept a lion in their basement and told their debtors to “go down and talk to Leo.”

Last but not least, I used one of the most amazing real stories I’ve come across in 26 years of freelance journalism. Back in 1943 a fully loaded munitions ship caught fire in New York harbor. If it had exploded, it would have taken out other munitions ships docked nearby, and the resulting shockwave would have flattened a number of New Jersey port towns, as well as the northern tip of Staten Island and the southern end of Manhattan. It could have been the greatest disaster in human history, if not for the incredibly brave efforts of a little band of local firemen, dockworkers, and Coast Guardsmen. This is all true! (I interviewed an 88-year-old former Coastie who was there that day, and made his story part of my book.)

It was a really fun challenge for me to weave these real tales into my fictional present-day world, and to make them emotionally significant to my characters.

Learn more about the author and his work at Gabriel Cohen's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Graving Dock.

My Book, The Movie: Red Hook.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jed Z. Buchwald & Diane Greco Josefowicz's "The Zodiac of Paris"

Jed Z. Buchwald is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. His books include The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves. Diane Greco Josefowicz teaches in the writing program at Boston University.

Buchwald and Josefowicz applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science, and reported the following:

The Zodiac of Paris recounts the European fortunes of the Dendera zodiac, an ancient bas-relief temple ceiling adorned with symbols of the stars and planets. Now installed at the Louvre, it was discovered by the French during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt and removed, in 1821, by a French archaeological vandal who brought it to Paris. There the zodiac caused a sensation because it seemed to suggest that the Biblical account of creation was wrong—a dangerous proposition at a time when departures from religious orthodoxy were crimes against the state as well.

We stumbled on the zodiac’s story when one of us wandered into a Paris book shop and found a small volume, half-clad in red Morocco, with a single word embossed on the spine: ZODIAQUE. This was a collection of pamphlets, dating from the zodiac’s Paris debut, assembled and elegantly bound by an early enthusiast. It is part of the enduring magic of the subject that, as a result of this discovery, we soon became fascinated by the object’s power to excite scientific, religious, and political passions.

Before 1800, most accounts of the zodiacs discovered in Egypt (of which only one was physically brought to France years later) were written by people who had actually seen it; many were produced during the French occupation. After Napoleon’s return, these stories, accompanied by drawings, began to circulate. On page 99, we shift from eyewitness accounts of the zodiacs to the arguments they provoked, as scientists and scholars became obsessed by the historical, religious and astronomical facts that the objects appeared to encode.

At issue was the age of creation: If the zodiacs pictured the sky at the times when the edifices containing them were constructed , then astronomy, rather than textual sources from the Bible and classical antiquity, could be used to date the temples. Astronomers quickly pointed out that the dates that resulted from their calculations were remote indeed from anything offered by Biblical chronology. Since hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered, and knowledge of ancient Egypt was correspondingly primitive, the zodiac offered fertile ground for flights of abundant speculation along these lines, much of which ultimately concerned whether science or religion was the more authoritative source of knowledge about the past.

Read an excerpt from The Zodiac of Paris, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Beth Greenfield's "Ten Minutes from Home"

Beth Greenfield received her M.A. in journalism from New York University and has since written about travel, entertainment, gay culture, and parenting for publications including the New York Times, Lonely Planet guidebooks, Out, Time Out New York Kids, and Time Out New York, where she is currently a staff editor. She lives in New York City and Provincetown with her partner and their daughter.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her newly published memoir, Ten Minutes from Home, and reported the following:

When I opened Ten Minutes from Home to see what was on page 99, I was disappointed: It was only half a page of text, the end of chapter nine. Could it really come close to passing the Ford Madox Ford test? My initial answer was, "No way." But upon further thought, I think it actually comes pretty close.

My book is, most simply, a tale of adolescent grief. It tells the story of what happens in my family in 1982, when I was 12 years old, after our car was hit by a drunk driver, killing my 7-year-old brother and 13-year-old best friend. My narrative explores all sorts of relationships of mine and how they were affected—how I felt anger toward my mother because she was so crushed by her grief, how I hungered for new close friendships and sought them from neighbors I had little in common with, how I turned to many other adults in my life, from teachers to the new young rabbi of our suburban New Jersey synagogue, to become stand-in mother figures for me. It also takes a close look at the role my grandparents played after the accident, how they lived with us for a short time, greeting mourners and trying to make life continue normally for me while my parents were on the emotional mend.

And what appears on page 99 kind of exemplifies all that. It takes place at the end of a house call from my mother's friend and her 13-year-old son, Scott, on whom I had a massive crush at the time. The friends' good-bye wishes prompt me to ruminate on the types of phrases I kept hearing from caring adults—how I, after being forced to mature overnight after the accident, had begun to read into everything that people said to me. And how one of my grandmothers, my father's mother, was here when I needed her most. It is a snapshot of my adolescent self, expressing pain, thankfulness and a new, unfamiliar wisdom.

All that week, I had begun to sense deep meaning in people's basic words. "Take care" meant "What happened to you is unspeakable, so I don't know what to say."

"Take care of Mom" meant, "I know she's a mess. Don't do anything to make it worse." In general, people stuck to their clichés. They let me figure out the rest.

"Later," Scott said, nodding in my direction. "Feel better."

Grandma Lil saw them to the door and then wrapped her arms around me. When she let go I saw that her eyes were wet with tears, and that her lip quivered as she tried to hold herself together.

"That's my granddaughter," she said, gripping each arm. "That's my Beth." She held my face between the palms of her hands, soft and warm, vaguely scented with lemony hand cream and tuna salad, and leaned in to stamp a juicy kiss just under my left eye. I closed it and smiled, thinking of all the times she'd put her lips to my cheeks, so relieved she was there to do it then.

Read an excerpt from Ten Minutes from Home, and learn more about the book and author at Beth Greenfield's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Pippin's "Hollywood Westerns and American Myth"

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy, and determined that "p. 99 is actually not a bad 'sample'." Here is a brief description of the book:

Robert Pippin argues here for the importance of political psychology for any adequate political philosophy, and so encourages a re-animation of a philosophical concern with those dynamics of the human soul relevant to any life in common. Traditionally, such a psychology concerned the core political passions: among others, love, especially love of one’s own, fear (fear of violent death, of suffering and insecurity), desires for ease and luxury and pleasure, and a powerful passion called by many names: thymos, amour-propre, vanity, self-love, the desire for recognition, the need to secure one’s status with others and even to elevate one’s status above and even at the expense of others. Secondly, he argues that while these issues are not in the foreground of much political thought (concerned almost exclusively with the problem of legitimacy), they are treated in subtle and compelling ways in many of the great Hollywood Westerns. For many such films are about the founding of modern bourgeois, law-abiding, property owning, market economy, technologically advanced societies in transition situations of, mostly, lawlessness (or corrupt and ineffective law) that border on classic “state of nature” theories, and so such Westerns adopt a mythic form of narration about founding. The question often raised is the question of how legal order (of a particular modern form, the form of liberal democratic capitalism) is psychologically possible, under what conditions it can be formed and command allegiance, how the bourgeois virtues, especially the domestic virtues, can be said to get a psychological grip in an environment where the heroic and martial virtues are so important. Pippin singles out for special attention three films, Red River, directed by Howard Hawks, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Searchers by John Ford.

Learn more about Hollywood Westerns and American Myth at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cristina Mazzoni's "She-Wolf"

Cristina Mazzoni is a Professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Vermont.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Beast (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and reported the following:

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” It is clearly not up to me, the author, to comment on the quality of my own work; to reveal relationships between a particular page and the book as a whole, however, is precisely what my university pays me to do, for much of my workday. Page 99 of She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon discusses the work of Latin poet Propertius; he compares the poet’s verbal task to the maternal work of the Roman she-wolf—who rescued abandoned infants Romulus and Remus by feeding them with her own milk. The poet’s voice, an expression of his chest, celebrates Rome’s greatness much like the she-wolf’s milk, expressed through her teats, allowed for Rome’s very birth. But the she-wolf, as well as generous, is a fierce beast; so also the Romans, according to another author quoted on p.99—ancient historian Justin—“had the disposition of wolves, being insatiable of blood and tyranny.”

Given the book’s title and the time period discussed on this page, the reader of p.99 might conclude that She-Wolf deals with the ancient world; that, however, is only one-third true—the remaining two thirds of the book examine later periods, all the way up to the twenty-first century. Poetry, the subject of p.99, is not the book’s only focus—equally important are artworks as well as literary, historical, and political prose. Conversely, what of p.99 is typical of the book is a close reading of the complexities embodied in the Roman beast: sexual greed tempered by protective maternity, literal beastliness marked by metaphorical significance, selflessness made dangerous by natural ferocity. The texts quoted on p.99 provide just two examples of how the she-wolf, inherently ambiguous, has served to represent, at different times and through a variety of media, a number of disparate issues and ideas—among them, our moral imperatives towards others’ needs, the pervasiveness of misogyny, the status of immigrants, and the meaning and acquisition of a national identity.

Read an excerpt from She-Wolf, and learn more about the book and author at the Cambridge University Press website and Cristina Mazzoni's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue