Daniel Swift's "Bomber County"

Daniel Swift has written for Bookforum, the New York Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War, and reported the following:

Yup, it works like a charm. On page 99 of Bomber County you get a war story, a little poetry, some (possibly) dodgy maths, and an anecdote about a craps game between decommissioned bomber crews on Oahu in 1945. You also get to meet John Ciardi, translator of Dante, bestselling American poet of the 1950s, rear gunner on B-29s in the Pacific during the Second World War, all-round man of action and letters who once said, "Whenever my imagination runs cold and deep I go out and look at a B-29 for five minutes and I'm cured" (quoted on p. 99). Bomber County is about the strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War, and the poetry written about those campaigns, both by those in the planes doing the bombing and those in the cities waiting to be bombed. My grandfather was a bomber pilot, with the British RAF, and he was lost in June 1943 on a raid over Germany. I decided to go and find him, and along the way I uncovered many long-forgotten poets, and their stories. Area bombing is a particularly violent, desperate style of warfare, but one of its compensations is the extraordinary culture the experience of bombing produced: amongst poets, photographers, novelists, diarists, journalists, and the many civilians who watched the bombs falling. Ciardi's story tells a little portion of the bigger story of the bombing war, but for me it also sheds light from an unexpected angle upon the life of my grandfather; all are parts of a largely forgotten history, and page 99 is a part of that.

Read more about Bomber County at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Jones' "Children as Treasures"

Mark A. Jones is Associate Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan, and reported the following:

Page 99 tells the tale of a group of high-minded scientific professionals—child psychologists, pediatricians, normal school professors—who were eager to become socially influential figures in early 20th century Japan. They, like their counterparts in America, Britain, and Germany, worked to popularize a new science of childhood to the wider public; in particular, they sought every opportunity to teach a new stratum of highly educated mothers how to employ science in the home in order to raise (and love) their children in a child-centered way. Page 99 captures one part of this story—how these scientific professionals engaged in a self-promoting yet uneasy relationship with Japan’s most famous department store, Mitsukoshi, in order to stage wildly popular children’s exhibitions and to vault their ideas and themselves into public prominence.

Page 99 reflects the book’s larger purpose—to analyze the numerous groups who worked to reshape the idea of childhood and the daily life of children in Japan from 1900 through 1930. These people, whom I call Japan’s architects of childhood, incarnated three influential visions of the child—as little citizen, superior student, and childlike child—during the prewar era. Although no vision of the child “won out” by 1930, the vision of the child as superior student was beginning to carry the day, as aspirational mothers, profiteering publishers, and influence-seeking teachers cooperated to spread a widely appealing belief—as they put it, “Any child can become a superior student.” These groups propagated the notion that early 20th century Japan was leaving behind a feudal past to become a modern meritocracy; as part of that process, they promoted a vision of the child as a striving student able to achieve educational success and social mobility. The result was the birth of the educationally obsessed family, headed by the (in)famous “education mother” and dedicated to helping the child navigate the new meritocratic world of the modern school system. This type of family became the norm in 20th century Japan and, interestingly, is also becoming commonplace today in other regions of the world, such as South Korea, China, the United States, and elsewhere.

Learn more about Children as Treasures at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael T. Bernath's "Confederate Minds"

Michael T. Bernath is the Charlton W. Tebeau Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Miami.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South, and reported the following:

During the Civil War, white southerners used pens and printing presses, as well as swords and cannon, to fight for their independence. My book examines the wartime efforts of Confederates to create a uniquely southern literature and culture, and thus prove the distinctiveness of the southern people and legitimate their desire for a separate national existence. Independence won on the battlefield would be meaningless so long as southerners remained in a state of intellectual “vassalage,” dependent on the North for their books, periodicals, and teachers. For this reason, the war did not stop cultural life in the South. Instead, the production of new Confederate periodicals, books, and textbooks accelerated at an astonishing rate, as southern writers and publishers rushed to provide their new nation with its own literature. In this tremendous outpouring of native print, cultural nationalists believed they saw the Confederacy coalescing into a true nation.

As for the “Page 99 Test,” my page 99 comes in Chapter 3, “The Birth of Confederate Literature,” and it describes some of the grandiose predictions of Confederate cultural nationalists as they envisioned their great future national literature and the role that the war would play in its formation. Here is an excerpt:

Spurred on by revolution, separate nationality, and war, ‘‘Southern Genius shall break the Northern chain which has hitherto bound it,’’ Southern Field and Fireside agreed. ‘‘Full well we know this fair land has poets, and essayists, and novelists within her borders, whose powers and talents will be developed by the circumstances of the hour.’’70 ‘‘New thoughts’’ arising from this ‘‘new national life’’ would spark a renaissance in the Confederacy, and it was incumbent on those who lived in such times to aid this rising Confederate culture.71

‘‘We are entering upon a new era—we live in historic times, and many things are to be thought of and to be done,’’ Atticus Haygood told his readers. ‘‘Old forms are passing away—new ideas are being struck out ... and new duties devolve upon us all.’’72

Momentous historical events inevitably spawned ‘‘periods of great intellectual activity,’’ these nationalists assured themselves. For, as Professor A. B. Stark explained, ‘‘When the minds and passions of men are aroused by these political upheavals, they must manifest and body forth themselves in some form.’’73 Neither Stark nor Haygood had any doubts about how these heightened passions would manifest themselves in the Confederacy. ‘‘Great moral, or political, revolutions nearly always inaugurate new eras in literature,’’ Haygood intoned. ‘‘We are now in the midst of great revolution—we are to be ‘a peculiar people,’ and our literature ought to bear the impress of our distinctive characteristics. It must, then, be created; and never was there a more glorious prospect than is now inviting Southern talent.’’74 Breathing the rarefied air of their new nation and confronted with daily examples of unprecedented heroism and valor on the battlefield, Confederate writers and poets could not help but be inspired to excellence.

While page 99 captures well the spirit and vision of Confederate nationalists at the start of the war, it does not speak to what Confederates actually did in their attempt to secure southern intellectual independence during the war – the periodicals they launched, the books they published, the poems they wrote, the plays they produced, the critiques they leveled – which is the focus of the bulk of my book. Nor does it mention the related and essential campaign for southern educational independence in which Confederate teachers and educational reformers sought to liberate southern children from the pervasive and, in their view, insidious influences of the North by writing and publishing their own textbooks, training and hiring their own native teachers, and supporting their own native schools.

In the end, Confederates proved no more able to win their intellectual independence than their political freedom, though they struggled mightily for both. By analyzing the motives driving the struggle for Confederate intellectual independence, by charting its wartime accomplishments, and by assessing its ultimate failure, my book makes provocative arguments about the nature of Confederate nationalism, life within the Confederacy, and the perception of southern cultural distinctiveness.

Learn more about Confederate Minds at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ruth Harris' "Dreyfus"

Ruth Harris is the author of Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. A fellow and tutor at Oxford University, she has written widely on topics in French history, cultural history, women’s history, and the history of medicine.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century, and reported the following:

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you…”

Not in the case of my book on Dreyfus – only some of the major themes are alluded to. Page 99 is half used up by illustrations, but it is not a picture book, although it does bring into focus the importance of the Affair first and foremost as a spy story . One of the first, in fact, replete with tales of stolen documents, forged evidence, people in disguises. There were agents, double-agents and spymasters. Mysterious women (invented) delivering messages while shrouded in black veils, and debauched scoundrels who sold secrets to pay gambling debts. All this is alluded to on page 99.

But the spy story did little more than get it all going. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish soldier falsely accused of espionage at the end of the nineteenth-century. His case – which pitted supporters of the army against supporters of justice from 1894 until his exoneration in 1906 – tore France apart, became an international scandal and set off political shock waves which have lasted to this day.

From then on it became a battle of high principle and low politics which sucked in the greatest in the land – presidents, premiers, authors and scientists. The “intellectuals” made their first appearance on the stage. Old friends lied to each other, new and unlikely alliances were formed. Some rallied meetings of tens of thousands of people and led street riots, others consulted mediums to gain a mystical insight into events. It was a battle of beliefs and ideas as much as of spies, a contest of fundamental ideas and personal philosophies about the essence of what it is to be French and a citizen – and whether that was compatible with parallel identities as a Jew, a Protestant, a Catholic or – nowadays – a Muslim.

Page 99 has little to say on this: it alludes to the spying, the political manoeuvring; the reader meets some of the most important actors -- Esterhazy, the real spy; Picquart the soldier jailed because he thought Dreyfus innocent; Schwartzkoppen the German spymaster; Scheurer-Kestner, the venerable Senator who risked his reputation for Dreyfus and died of cancer the day of his release; Billot, the minister who blocked attempts to investigate the case. But you will not find out what made them all tick, why they took the positions they did. For that, you will have to read on….

Learn more about Dreyfus at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Grimes' "Mentor"

Tom Grimes directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University. He is the author of five novels, including Season’s End, City of God, and Redemption Song, and the editor of The Workshop: Seven Decades of Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has twice been a finalist for the PEN/Nelson Algren Award.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mentor: A Memoir, and reported the following:

I was surprised and saddened when I opened Mentor to page 99. Although the memoir is largely about my friendship with Frank Conroy, and the experience of my writing life with him, page 99 refers to my play, Spec, and its production in Los Angeles during the time I was an Iowa Writers Workshop student in 1991. I had set aside my novel Season’s End to spend six weeks in L.A. the summer the play was produced. While I was there, I sat through hours of rehearsals every day, and then spent time with the cast and crew backstage every night. We drank, talked, and quickly I became close friends with the play’s producer, who happened to be a great actor known for his originating roles in Sam Shepard’s plays, including one in Buried Child, which earned him a Tony nomination. He was James Gammon and on page 99 I wrote about the evening we met. He didn’t know I was writing a memoir, but I planned to mail him a signed copy as soon as I received my books from Tin House Books, my publisher. They arrived last month – late July, 2010. The day after they arrived, I learned that Jimmie (as I and everyone else called him) had died of cancer a week earlier. I spoke with his wife, Nancy, and promised to send her a signed copy in Jimmie’s memory. But I was struck by something about the nature of memoirs I hadn’t considered until that moment.

I’ve written five novels, but Mentor is my first and perhaps the only memoir I will ever write. So, never before had I encountered the fact that someone I had written about was dead, truly dead, not fictional, make-believe dead. In fiction, even if your characters die, they’re still alive, in a way. All you have to do to bring them back to life is reread the book. But with a memoir the people you’ve loved are dead, dead forever.

Memoirs, I learned, are ultimately about mortality. We recollect events and feelings from our past, but we’re unable to hold onto them, or to the people we knew. After I’d read page 99, I counted the number of people I’d written about in Mentor who are now gone. I hadn’t realized how much of my past has vanished. And should I ever reread Mentor I’ll do so with a sense of melancholy. But by opening my book I can recall the life we shared, even though I know I can never have it back.

Read an excerpt from Mentor, and learn more about the book and author at Tom Grimes' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Jay Dolin's "Fur, Fortune, and Empire"

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, and reported the following:

Fur, Fortune, and Empire is a story about how America was transformed from a loose collection of colonies into a transcontinental nation. A major part of that story revolves around the clashes between various empires—French, Dutch, English, Russian, Swedish, and Spanish—seeking to control the North American fur trade, and by extension, the continent itself. Page 99, although not one of the more stirring passages in the book, offers a glimpse of the revival of the French fur trade after many years of struggle.

France was the first imperial power to establish fur trading posts on the eastern edge of the continent, in the late 1500s. The French colony, New France, recorded its best trading year ever in 1646, shipping out more than 33,000 pounds of pelts, predominantly beaver. But growing violence in the wilderness overshadowed this success. The Iroquois were viciously attacking New France’s Indian allies, including its main trading partner, the Huron. The attacks were part of the Beaver Wars, so named because historians originally believed that they were motivated primarily by the Iroquois’ need to find new sources of beaver to trade with the Dutch, and the Iroquois thought that the best way to find those sources was to attack other Indians and take their furs and land. In more recent scholarship, however, the Beaver Wars are seen in the context of mourning wars, which were a traditional means of rebuilding a tribe’s strength after many of its members had been killed or died—in this case as a result of a series of smallpox epidemics that had devastated the Iroquois.

Whatever the cause, the results of the Beaver Wars were the same. The Iroquois virtually destroyed the Hurons, and in the process brought New France’s fur trade to its knees. In subsequent years the range of the Beaver Wars expanded as the Iroquois attacked other Indians, further crippling the French-Indian trade. As a result, by the early 1660s, New France’s fur trade was for all intents and purposes “dead”—although only temporarily.

And to pick up the story, here is an excerpt from page 99:

New France’s fur trade emerged with restored vigor between the mid-1660s and the late 1680s. Part of the reason for this resurgence, ironically, can be traced to the Beaver Wars, which were slowly coming to an end. As the Indians displaced by the Iroquois traveled west, north, and south to the shores of Lakes Michigan and Superior, they met tribes unfamiliar with the fur trade, including the Sioux, Miami, Cree, Fox, and Illinois. These tribes were enamored of the European wares owned by the displaced Indians, and a new trade was born. The Ottawa, whose name literally translates as ‘traders,’ exchanged their worn knives, kettles, and cloth for fine beaver robes and pelts provided by the distant tribes, and then took those furs to Montreal, where they were exchanged for European goods, which were in turn used to obtain more furs. Thus the Ottawa became middlemen in a thriving trade, and as the historian Harold A. Innis put it, ‘the Miamis and the Sioux ceased roasting the beaver for food, and began a search for skins.’

Exploration was another reason for the revival of New France’s fur trade. Frenchmen whose names now dot America’s landscape ventured west and south to claim new lands, establish trading ties with local Indians, and find a water route to the western ocean. Among the first to set out were the Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette and the fur trader Louis Joliet. Lured by tales of a great river—which the Indians called the Meschacebe, or the ‘Father of Waters’—to the south of the Great Lakes, Marquette and Joliet launched an expedition in the spring of 1673 to see if the tales were true, and to discover into which body of water this great river emptied. With five Indian guides they journeyed in birchbark canoes to Green Bay, ascended the Fox river, portaged to the Wisconsin, and proceeded to its terminus, where they found the Father of Waters, which would later be called the Mississippi.

Read an excerpt from Fur, Fortune, and Empire, and learn more about he book and author at Eric Jay Dolin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelly M. Greenhill's "Weapons of Mass Migration"

Kelly M. Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Tufts University and Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy, and reported the following:

Coercion is generally understood to refer to the practice of inducing or preventing changes in political behavior through the use of threats, intimidation, or some other form of pressure—most often, military force. Weapons of Mass Migration (WMM) focuses on a very particular nonmilitary method of applying coercive pressure—the use of migration and refugee crises as instruments of persuasion.

This kind of coercion can succeed in large part because of the very real fears that uncontrolled cross-border population movements tend to generate within those societies expected to bear their political, social and monetary costs. Indeed, long before September 11 galvanized a new preoccupation with border security, refugees and illegal migrants had transmuted in many countries from a matter of low politics to high politics, involving a shift in the definition of national security threats and the practice of security policy. At the same time, many of these self-same societies are legally, if not morally, obligated to welcome those fleeing violence and persecution. Reconciling competing imperatives to keep people out while also letting them in can be challenging, if not simply impossible. Under such circumstances, incentives to concede to coercers’ demands—in exchange for making a mass migration stop or simply evaporate—can be quite powerful.

Page 99 discusses the United States’ confused and muddled initial response to the 1980 Mariel boatlift, one of three attempted cases of Cuban-initiated migration-driven coercion examined in Chapter 2. Although Mariel has been traditionally viewed as the result of a fit of pique by Cuban President Fidel Castro, WMM shows that it was in fact part of a concerted effort by Cuba to materially change US foreign and immigration policy by flooding the country with what were often referred to as “undesirables”. As a consequence, 125,000 additional Cubans emigrated to the US in a five-month period, including a non-trivial number of criminals and the mentally ill. Castro, for his part, extracted a new immigration accord and a crackdown on Cuban hijackers, while US President Jimmy Carter attributed his subsequent loss in that fall’s presidential election in no small part to the immigration crisis. And, as the book makes clear, Mariel was far from unique.

WMM identifies at least 57 documented cases of this kind of coercion since ratification of the United Nations Convention on Refugees alone, well over half of which allowed coercers to achieve at least some of their objectives—objectives that have ranged from monetary payoffs and foreign aid to full-blown military interventions and even regime change. Indeed, attempts to employ this kind of coercion have influenced foreign policy—and continue to do so—in domains as wide-ranging and diverse as the US’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as well as to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s; the European Union’s resolutions to end sanctions against Libya in the early 2000s; and China’s relatively quiescent stance regarding North Korea’s nuclear program today. Although heretofore a phenomenon that has been “hiding in plain sight,” WMM demonstrates that mass movements of people can be powerful, if tragically exploited, policy weapons.

Learn more about Weapons of Mass Migration at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erika Doss' "Memorial Mania"

Erika Doss is professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism, Looking at LIFE Magazine, and Twentieth Century American Art.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, and reported the following:

From page 99: (and the last line of 98):

Consider the narrative codes of mourning devised by the New York Times in its nationally-syndicated "Portraits of Grief" column, which first appeared three days after 9/11 and continued until late December 2001. Initially called "Among the Missing," the Times' series originated with the missing-persons flyers that circulated immediately after the collapse of the Twin Towers. Featuring personal details and photographs, these Xeroxed flyers were posted on every public surface near Ground Zero, and then, as the missing became the dead, formed the basis for many temporary memorials. Impressionistic and ritualized, much like the memorials on which they were modeled, "Portraits of Grief" were snapshots of affect: two hundred-word profiles, usually accompanied by tiny head-shots, which casually sketched the preferred pastimes (parties, dancing, golf, fly-fishing) and endearing qualities (loved to laugh, loved to cook) of 9/11's victims. Intimate and anecdotal, these sketches were the seeming antithesis to the cold eulogies of the typical newspaper obituary--much as temporary memorials are often cast as the emotional opposites of permanent stone and bronze monuments.

Page 99 is toward the end of a chapter in Memorial Mania titled "Grief: Temporary Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning," which focuses on what I see as changed cultural and social practices of public mourning in the United States. As I ask more specifically on page 64: "How are feelings of grief mediated in contemporary America? What do temporary memorials tell us about who and what is deemed memorable in American history, and in terms of an imagined national future? By extension, is grief a useful or productive public affect? Or are there psychic and political dangers for a nation seemingly "too attached" to public expressions of grief?"

Memorial Mania opens with these questions: Why do we make memorials in America today—and why do we make so many of them? I find answers in the fevered pitch of public feeling in America today, including grief, gratitude, fear, shame, and anger. Pairing discussions of particular memorials with the affective conditions in which they are imagined, experienced, and understood, each chapter of Memorial Mania explores the cultural, social, and political conditions that inform today's urgent feelings about history and memory.

Increasing numbers of temporary memorials, for example, like those discussed on p. 99, suggest how new understandings of grief and citizenship are being framed in America today. Memorials that commemorate the victims of terrorism, like the Oklahoma City National Memorial and various 9/11 memorials, simultaneously embody widespread fears about the state of the nation and equally emotional narratives about social stability and national security. Scores of new war memorials, including the National World War II Memorial, negotiate the terms of gratitude and what it means to say "thank you" in America today—and to whom. A growing body of shame-based memorials, including those that address the subjects of slavery and lynching, challenge standard accounts of a progressive national narrative and raise questions about how to remember, represent, and perhaps redeem the nation's shameful histories of racial violence and intolerance. And memorials that pay tribute to Spanish conquistadors in the American southwest are framed by angry debates over revisionist history and foundational myths.

On the whole, page 99 is a good representative of Memorial Mania's primary objective--which looks at today's growing numbers of memorials to show how fresh insights about American history, memory, and self and national identity are especially realized through the lens of public feeling.

Learn more about Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America at the University of Chicago website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachael Stryker's "The Road to Evergreen"

Rachael Stryker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Mills College, and the author of several articles on international and domestic adoption. She is currently at work on a book connecting anthropology to public life, Public Interest Ethnography: A Primer.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Road to Evergreen: Adoption, Attachment Therapy, and the Promise of Family, and reported the following:

P. 99 is remarkably representative of this book as a whole. The page marks the beginning of an analysis of chapter four (titled “Prisoners in Our Own Home”), which outlines the processes by which adoptive parents come to embrace the Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) diagnosis to explain the challenging postplacement behaviors of adopted children, as well as parents’ decision to bring their children to undergo controversial models of attachment therapy in Evergreen, Colorado (think “emotional boot camp” for kids). The page also begins by highlighting a paradox: adoptive parents in the United States understand parental love as a curative agent, one that is expected to heal the emotional wounds of formerly institutionalized adoptees caused by abandonment and/or orphanhood and help integrate the child into the new family. However, parental love often fails to turn formerly institutionalized children toward the adoptive family – in fact, adoptees (and particularly those who have been severely abused, who have spent long periods of time in institutions and/or who have been adopted at older ages) may feel much conflict, confusion, and psychic pain in response to parental love as it is expressed through the nuclear family. Parents must thus find other ways to inculcate the impulse toward emotional reciprocity within children, sometimes turning to medical professionals like those who practice the Evergreen model of attachment therapy, particularly because they are experts who promise to help parents emotionally manage the children and project an affective future for their family once again.

The promise of rebuilding the adoptive family is an alluring one for adoptive parents whose postplacement expectations have been dashed, one that can overshadow the dangers or consequences of the methods used to procure the prize. Adoptive parents undoubtedly learn that the Evergreen model of attachment therapy is controversial and possibly detrimental to children’s emotional and physical health. Still they are drawn to it. On p. 99, I demonstrate that adoptive parents often treat the RAD diagnosis as a “black box” (Latour 1987), that is, as “a mechanism that is so complex in terms of its history or inner workings that one does not care how it actually works but only how much input he or she needs to provide to achieve a desired result (in this case, child love).” In other words, when adoptees frustrate the hegemonic logic of the nuclear family through their challenging behaviors, parents typically do not investigate their own actions, expectations for, or models of the family. Instead, they are elated to discover that there may be a reason for their children’s behaviors that have nothing to do with their own parenting practices – one that may find a “quick fix” through professional intervention. In addition, I argue that the RAD diagnosis operates as what medical anthropologist Howard Stein (1985) has called “a signal symptom,” that is, a medical diagnosis borne from a shared social conflict that is intended to displace and direct elsewhere the location of that conflict, thereby allowing society to focus and distract them selves its actual source, which can be overwhelming to all involved. In this case, the RAD diagnosis allows parents to locate the problem solely within the promising and more optimistic realm of the reparable emotional disorder, rather than look systemically at child circulation systems that are, in fact, not necessarily child-centered.

When someone picks up The Road to Evergreen and turns to p. 99 then, what she or he will get is a glimpse of the way the book as a whole challenges readers not just to rethink motivations for the pathologization of formerly institutionalized adoptees, but to also recognize some important contradictions inherent in adoption systems in which formerly institutionalized children are regularly called upon to help individuals build their nuclear families.

Learn more about The Road to Evergreen at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mitchell Aboulafia's "Transcendence"

Mitchell Aboulafia is Director of Interdivisional Liberal Arts and Professor of Liberal Arts and Philosophy at The Juilliard School. His books include The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy (2001).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Transcendence: On Self-Determination and Cosmopolitanism, and reported the following:

Lately there has been a spate of articles and books in both popular and scholarly venues that emphasize the importance of empathy in moral development. Many of these works, including those by philosophers, have drawn on contemporary research in psychology and biology. For example, authors such as Frans de Waal approach the issue by documenting ways in which human behavior is similar to animal behavior. What is striking about much of this work is the extent to which it not only recapitulates arguments about moral sentiments made by philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but how it typically overlooks the efforts of pragmatists writing in the middle of the last century. The work of George Herbert Mead is especially noteworthy here. He specifically addressed the relevance of sharing the attitudes of others in moral and social development. The pragmatists can help us navigate challenges and perplexities generated by approaching morality from the vantage point of empathy.

Transcendence: On Self-Determination and Cosmopolitanism addresses different ways of thinking about empathy and sympathy that are consistent with the contributions of classical pragmatists, for example, Dewey, James, and Mead. It provides ways for appreciating the strengths and limitations of “empathic” approaches, in addition to showing how they can be related to self-determination and cosmopolitanism. Page 99 discusses one of the problems involved in viewing moral development in terms of taking or sharing the perspectives of others. The title of the chapter is “W. E. B. Du Bois: Double-Consciousness, Jamesian Sympathy,and the Cosmopolitan.” The passage below occurs in the middle of a discussion of Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness.

If one has to expend too much of one’s resources trying to see oneself through the eyes of the other, one loses oneself or one becomes split, a divided self. So the Jamesian model, and Mead’s for that matter, which claims that impartiality is nurtured through individuals taking multiple perspectives, must come to terms with the reality that seeing oneself through the eyes of others can in fact be a damaging experience. Under certain conditions the self can as easily become alienated from itself as it can be led to expand its horizons through taking the perspectives of others.

The previous chapter on Mead and cosmopolitanism provided an account of impartiality in which impartiality is not understood as a view from nowhere. Page 99 continues the discussion of impartiality in light of Du Bois’s insights.

Those who have a double-consciousness are in a unique position to achieve the impartiality of the spectator because of a heightened awareness of otherness and multiplicity. This in fact can be a resource for marginalized peoples. Multiple standpoints can lead to a breadth of vision and insight not possessed by dominant groups. Yet this advantage can be undermined through the alienation inherent in dominant/subordinate relationships. The participants in these relationships are not disembodied spirits. Those who are subordinate become frustrated and angry at those who compel them to see the world as they do. Du Bois confronts us with how asymmetry in power relations, which in his analysis is tied to racism, can undermine the best intentions of actors regarding sympathetic or impartial responses to others. To state the obvious, one cannot expect individuals to respond sympathetically under the yoke of oppression. In fact, the oppressed are confronted with a hostile, invasive “critic,” who often appears under the guise of an impartial spectator. This is crucial. Those in the dominant position often have the luxury of appearing to be impartial or benevolent. But if there is no mutuality, no basic respect for the humanity of the other, the result is not impartiality but paternalism. The undermining of the “impartiality” of those who are subordinate through the interior “critic” cannot be separated from the way that the Veil prevents those who dominate, those who see themselves as more human than the other, from truly sympathizing with others. Asymmetrical relations undermine “natural” sympathetic responses for all those involved. For those who dominate, pity can become conflated and confused with sympathy. And pity infantilizes.

I should note that there is a crucial distinction made in Transcendence between sympathy and empathy. Its implications are briefly explored in an online “Afterword.”

The “Introduction’ and “Afterword” to Transcendence can be found on Stanford University Press’s web site.

--Marshal Zeringue