John J. Miller's "The Big Scrum"

John J. Miller writes for National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is the author of several books, including The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football and The First Assassin, a historical thriller set during the Civil War. The Chronicle of Higher Education has called him “one of the best literary journalists in the country.”

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Big Scrum and reported the following:

In writing this book about culture, sports, and politics, I hoped to fill the pages with colorful characters--not just Theodore Roosevelt, who is one of the most compelling men in American history, but also a number of his contemporaries, such as Walter Camp, Frederic Remington, and Knute Rockne. Page 99 is from a section that introduces longtime Harvard president Charles Eliot, a hater of football who battled Roosevelt over the future of the game. This excerpt provides a good glimpse of my narrative approach and also tells of how Harvard gained its school color of crimson.

...for a time each day all through life, sports and active bodily exercise. These are legitimate enjoyments, but if made the main object of life, they tire. They cease to be a source of durable satisfaction. Play must be incidental in a satisfactory life.”

His own concept of a satisfactory life led him to reject a career in business and gravitate toward the academy. After graduation from Harvard, he returned as a tutor--a kind of postgraduate teacher--and eventually became an assistant professor of math and chemistry. He continued to exercise and joined the crew team. His fellow boaters included four undergraduates and another young member of the faculty, Alexander Agassiz. In 1858, they took part in a three-mile race on the Charles River that would go down in school lore. Shortly before it began, all six tied red silk handkerchiefs around their heads. It contributed to their esprit de corps and also made the Harvard boat easy to spot from shore. This was the origin of crimson as Harvard’s school color. “It was the purest accident in the world,” recalled Eliot years later. “We might as well have bought blue.”

The morning of the race, Eliot began to write a letter to his fiancée: “I had rather win than not, but it is mighty little matter whether we beat or are beaten--rowing is not my profession, neither is it my love--it is only recreation, fun, and health.” He also promised not to row too hard. Although these words sounded like a preemptive rationalization for defeat, Eliot sincerely believed them. He enjoyed rowing, but more as a pleasant exertion than as an excuse to compete against others. As it happened, the debut of Harvard’s crimson was a big success: Eliot and his teammates won by several lengths. A couple of weeks later in a six-mile race, the Harvard rowers put on their red bandanas again and triumphed once more. The victory carried a prize of one-hundred dollars. In later years, Eliot joked that accepting his part of this purse had turned him into a professional athlete.

Learn more about the book and author at John J. Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Neiberg's "Dance of the Furies"

Michael Neiberg, a native of Pittsburgh, is an historian who specializes in the ways that societies interact with war and military institutions. His latest book, Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of War in 1914, analyzes the events of that fateful year from the perspective of “ordinary” Europeans. He has been a Guggenheim fellow, a founding member of the Société Internationale d’Étude de la Grande Guerre, and the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor of History at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Dance of the Furies and reported the following:

In the British comedy Blackadder Goes Forth, Private Baldrick pronounces to his fellow soldiers “I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry.” While Blackadder is obviously not meant as serious history, the line does reveal two basic truths about 1914. First, like Baldrick, few Europeans had hatreds for people in other countries strong enough to lead them to war. Second, most of them had no idea how the assassination of a little-known nobleman had put them in trenches to fight a war with no end in sight.

Page 99 of Dance of the Furies speaks to how the people of Europe responded to the events of the tragic summer of 1914. They did not go to war for the archduke or to avenge some distant slight to their national honor. Page 99 relates three strikingly similar anecdotes from three nations in the last days of peace. An English mother, in a journal to explain the war to her infant son, wrote that “if we fight, it is because we shall have been dragged in.” French food writer Claire de Pratz spoke with two fishermen who told her that although they did not want war, it was now obvious to them that the Germans did and so they saw no choice but to fight. The Berliner Tageblatt editorialized that “We didn’t want a war and we have done everything in our power to prevent it.” The responses were the same across the continent: few wanted war, but all were determined to resist what they saw as foreign aggression.

I hope that Dance of the Furies will help us to see the people of 1914 as they were, not as sepia-toned figures too simple or too stupid to see what they were unleashing. Their experiences tell us a great deal not only about their age, but ours. If we understand them, perhaps we can understand that the poor old ostrich didn’t die for nothing after all.

Learn more about Dance of the Furies at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin M. Schultz's "Tri-Faith America"

Kevin M. Schultz is Assistant Professor of History and Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise, and reported the following:

I really enjoy my page 99. It is the first page of Chapter 4, which starts with a great story about one of our most accomplished sociologists, Herbert Gans, moving with his wife into Levittown, New Jersey, in order to research his classic book, The Levittowners, which is probably the best book there is on postwar suburbia. But when he moved in, he appeared as just another neighbor, happy to have those 900 square feet rather than a cramped city apartment.

Gans was very confessional in the book, talking about his experiences moving into what had been just months before a potato field. He was also game when I sent him emails in 2008 inquiring about his experiences. For all his fame, he seemed to be a really nice, serious guy.

My wife and kids always tell me that learning history is a lot more fun when it's told as a series of stories that illustrate a point, so the story of Herbert Gans and his wife going to all those public meetings, observing the growth of the synagogues and churches, visiting the T-ball fields, and generally participating in the life of the community leads into the basic point of the chapter, which is that the postwar suburbs were not at all bland places with white picket fences, but rather locations of public discourse, where new neighbors negotiated terrain that was far different from where they had lived before.

Indeed, what Gans discovered is that, while racial divisions were muted from public discourse (there were no black people in Levittown), divisions between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews animated a world of discourse and forced a change in the norms that American lived by. The suburbs were not, in fact, a bland place where everyone melted together, but instead the location where Catholics and Jews demanded the right to be different, to be Catholic or Jewish without having to suffer any consequences.

On page 99, it's the story of Gans that helps me make that point.

Learn more about Tri-Faith America at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David A. Kirby's "Lab Coats in Hollywood"

David A. Kirby was a practicing molecular biologist before becoming Senior Lecturer in Science Communication Studies in the Center for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, UK. He has published numerous articles exploring the relationship between science, media and the public.

Kirby applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema, and reported the following:

My book covers the back stage role scientists play in the production of popular films. Scientific expertise can help filmmakers create plausible and visually interesting films. Science consultants become involved in numerous areas of film production including script checking, working with actors, set design, story advice, special effects, on set consultations, and sound design. Yet, scientists’ advice is only useful if it allows filmmakers to better utilize their own creative filmmaking expertise.

I was surprised to find how well page 99 conveys the book’s two central messages. I recount a story concerning the depiction of the alien radio signal in the film Contact. First, this story confirms how scientific certainty actually enhances creativity when filmmakers are faced with too many options:

The alien radio signal was particularly problematic for Contact’s (1997) filmmakers. Being an alien signal they had no basis for determining the transmission’s structure. As discussed in chapter 4, computer and video supervisor Ian Kelly hired Tom Kuiper and Linda Wald to develop the computer displays and audio for the radio signal. While an alien radio signal might sound fantastical, the science is actually mundane. Rather than facing infinite possibilities there is only a single option based on mathematics as long as the aliens live in the same universe as us. According to Kuiper it was fairly easy to determine the signal’s form, strength, and audio, because “It’s radio engineering of a pretty straightforward kind. It’s what radio astronomers do all the time.” Kuiper and Wald knew the precise distance from the Vega star system to Earth and that the signal would be a string of prime numbers housing an embedded television signal. So, to determine the radio signal’s characteristics they plugged the numbers into well-established equations.

Second, this story reveals some of the criteria filmmakers use for determining whether it is beneficial for their film to maintain scientific accuracy by exploring why filmmakers will adamantly adhere to one scientific fact, while quickly dismissing another. The film’s sound editor was not happy to learn that the signal would consist of a pure tone repeated as a prime number sequence (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc). The discovery of the alien radio signal is a powerful scene that is crucial to establishing the film’s atmosphere. His professional judgement was that a pure tone was not cinematically interesting enough to convey the combination of exhilaration and dread that the scene required. Likewise, he felt that the scene’s drama would be heightened if they could start the signal’s sequence off with a single ominous sound. One is not a prime number so an accurate sequence would start with two sounds.

When you watch the film you hear that the sound editor decided to maintain accuracy for only one of these facts –the prime number sequence. Why this fact and not the other? I find that filmmakers take into account the public’s familiarity with a scientific fact when making production decisions. Facts that are likely to be known by a majority of the public, like prime numbers, fall into the category I call “public science.” Facts that are relatively unknown outside an expert community I designate as “expert science.” Filmmakers are more likely to modify facts that they perceive as expert science. The fact that the radio signal would be a pure tone, for example, is unlikely to be known to anyone other than radio astronomers.

Visit David A. Kirby’s webpage or learn more about Lab Coats in Hollywood at the MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roger R. Reese's "Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought"

Roger R. Reese is professor of history at Texas A&M University and author of Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925–1941; Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918–1991; and The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II, and reported the following:

Page 98-100 closes out parts I and II and the discussion of why so many Soviet soldiers were captured in encirclements in 1941 by showing how in two separate incidents U.S. Army soldiers, facing similar circumstances fared about the same, the main difference being the historical interpretation of their motives. The historical profession is divided over the issues of why Soviet soldiers were captured en masse and why they fought at all for the Stalinist regime. The arguments are that they either fought out of love for Stalin and the Stalinist state, or they fought out of fear of the threat of execution. Anti-Stalinist sentiment is supposedly why they surrendered by the millions in 1941. I argue that while some soldiers did support Stalinism and others despised it, the majority of citizens who became soldiers fought for many reasons, most of which had nothing to do with their feelings about Stalin or his politics, or policies. Soldiers mostly fought out of elemental patriotism, for their country that had been invaded, without reference to or in spite of their government. I further argue that most surrenders and captures were a result simply of the chaos of war, the ineptitude of Soviet generals, and the German intent to capture as many Soviet soldiers as they could. No one has ever ascribed political motives or questioned the loyalty of the U.S. soldiers that were captured. The rest of the book analyzes the motivation and morale of the Soviet soldiery revealing that Russians were the most motivated to fight and the national minorities the least. The fact that there were more than two million cases of desertion and draft evasion disproves the contention that coercion was a significant factor in keeping men in the line. Above all, this book attempts to show, from their perspective, that Soviet soldiers were ordinary human beings who experienced the war in the same ways as soldiers in other armies.

Learn more about Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerald Early's "A Level Playing Field"

Gerald Early is Professor of English, African and African American Studies, and American Cultural Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new collection of essays, A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Level Playing Field lands the reader a bit more than two-thirds through the second essay of the volume: “Curt Flood, Gratitude, and the Image of Baseball.” On this particular page, I am in the midst of an account of how the black press reacted to St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood’s legal challenge to major league baseball’s reserve clause, which restricts a player from being able to offer his services to any team even if he has achieved a certain level of seniority. In effect, Flood was suing for free agency, something, of course, which baseball adopted in a modified form in the 1970s, a few years after Flood’s suit but not because of his suit, which was denied by the Supreme Court. The black press was largely supportive of Flood, although Flood’s claim of being “a slave” puzzled many whites (and some blacks, although blacks were less disturbed by the metaphor). He was making $90,000 a year at the time he was traded to Philadelphia in October 1969 (the act that triggered his lawsuit), a considerable sum at the time. But the idea among some blacks—including New York Times sportswriter William Rhoden even today—that playing high-level sports somehow degrades blacks is one of the main themes I explore in my book. This means that any sort of protest by a black athlete against the system, the bureaucracy, the institutional power of high level sports (run by whites and largely supported by white fans) is: 1) highly politicized in a form of entertainment that frequently gets politicized despite the fact that sport acts as an escape, and 2) a symbolic assertion of dignity and freedom for an oppressed group even if the athlete is making millions. I find this belief fascinating. Page 99 does not sum up the book. (No writer would admit to his or her book being reducible to one page, even if it were true.) But it comes close, in a highly truncated way.

Learn more about A Level Playing Field at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Dudley's "Broken Words"

Jonathan Dudley is a graduate of Yale's Divinity School and currently a M.D. student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics (published by Crown), he writes about the evangelical Christian community that raised him.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Broken Words and reported the following:

Page 99 of Broken Words is at the end of a section titled “The Bible Isn’t Pro-Environmental” and the beginning of another, titled “The Bible Isn’t Anti-Environmental.” These seemingly contradictory section headings reflect an ongoing argument I make throughout the book: how readers interpret the Bible reflects the beliefs they bring to it. As I argue in the first section, there are a host of different passages in the Bible that can be used to justify environmental exploitation, and most theologians in the past did read the Bible in ways that had sorry implications for the environment.

But as I argue in the second section, these previous readings were no more required by the text of scripture than the pro-environmental readings advocated by green evangelicals today. Both sets of readings emphasize some passages and de-emphasize others, construe words this way instead of that, and reflect the culture and assumptions of the interpreters. The God of Genesis may have destroyed almost all biological life on Earth in Noah’s flood, but on the other hand, the same God also commanded Noah to preserve two of each kind of every species.

This page also reflects my efforts in the book to demonstrate that the “Religious Left” has many of the same flawed assumptions about biblical interpretation as the “Religious Right”—and that all appeals to “what the Bible says” are veiled appeals to the cultural values of its interpreters. As I note in my chapter on Christian environmentalism, “the Bible isn’t proenvironmental, and it’s not antienvironmental either, because what the Bible is reflects the beliefs we bring to it.”

Learn more about the book and author at Jonathan Dudley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Pollack's "The Pun Also Rises"

John Pollack, who won the 1995 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, was a Presidential Speechwriter for Bill Clinton. Earlier, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Spain, as a field assistant in Antarctica, and as a strolling violinist on Mackinac Island.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics, and reported the following:

From Page 99-100 of The Pun Also Rises:

Soon enough, English-speaking Jewish comedians were playing to mainstream audiences and punning to great effect. After all, Americans of diverse backgrounds had long embraced puns and were hungry for fresh talent. In the first half of the twentieth century, many Jewish comedians—Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, Henny Youngman, Milton Berle, Gracie Allen and George Burns among them—rose to prominence. It wasn’t that Jewish comedians were the only punsters: Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello were masters of the art as well. From Vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood, puns were stock in trade.

Sometime around mid-century, though, the public’s changing comedic tastes began to maroon the humble pun. Although the precise tipping point is hard to pinpoint, puns began to draw more and more groans. Postwar audiences didn’t reject the pun entirely, but began responding better to humor that was a little more raw and a little less obviously constructed.

In an atomic age of duck-and-cover, the McCarthy hearings, and a nagging ennui about suburban conformism, a new and more irreverent stream of consciousness began to gather force. Much as jazz audiences of the time embraced the more dissonant music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, edgier comedic audiences were applauding iconoclastic Jewish comics such as Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce who, starting in the 1950s, began challenging longstanding humorous forms and taboos.

While both of them appreciated wordplay and Bruce pushed public language to new frontiers of impropriety, they drove American comedy in a whole new direction, away from the standard joke-and-punch-line routines. Other great comics quickly followed suit, and as the 1960s gathered momentum, traditional comedy began to seem passé, especially if audiences considered the topic to be tame. As such, the popularity of puns took a dive.

By this point in The Pun Also Rises, readers have explored the myriad forms that puns can take, examined how the brain extracts meaning from ambiguous sound, followed the rise of puns from ancient times, and are tracing the pun’s decline in western culture. Later in the book readers will learn the catalyst role that punning played in the invention of the world’s first alphabet, why puns still matter in today’s political and social discourse, and how they continue to facilitate human creativity and progress.

Learn more about the book and author at the official The Pun Also Rises website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David J. Linden's "The Compass of Pleasure"

David J. Linden, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular substrates of memory storage in the brain and a few other topics.

His publications include The Accidental Mind, a book that "seeks to explain how brain evolution has given rise to those qualities that most profoundly shape our human experience."

Linden applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, and reported the following:

Imagine my delight in finding that page 99 of The Compass of Pleasure is not only smutty, but has my favorite illustration of the entire book.

Most but not all homosexual behavior seen in animals would be more accurately described as bisexuality. In many species heterosexual contact occurs only during the female’s fertile phase, but homosexual behavior is common at other times. In some, like bonobos, it seems as if homosexual behavior, in addition to providing
sexual pleasure, also fulfills a social role by diffusing tension and promoting social bonding at the expense of aggression. At present, there are only a few examples of animals engaging in lifelong, purely homosexual behavior, and these have occurred mostly among males and mostly in captivity. Nonetheless, in a number of zoos around the world, male penguins of several species have been observed to form stable monogamous couples. They build nests together and use a rock as a surrogate egg. In one well-publicized case, a pair of male chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in New York City were provided with a fertilized egg, from which they successfully hatched a chick.4 Likewise, about 6 percent of domesticated rams court and mount other males exclusively, even when estrous females are present.



Figure 4.1 Adult bonobo females engaging in genital-genital rubbing, a common expression of bonobo sexuality that can result in orgasm. Illustration by Joan M. K. Tycko.

We can’t close out this discussion of animal sexuality without mentioning some even more exotic phenomena. Cross-species sex is most commonly observed in animals in captivity, but examples have been documented in wild populations as well. For example, male moose have been known to have sex with female horses. In a zoo in Siberia, a tiger and a lion were encouraged to mate and bore (infertile) offspring. Genetic analysis has been employed to identify offspring from cross-species hybrids in the wild, providing evidence for sexual encounters between grizzly bears and polar bears.

This section is part of a larger explication of the point that human mating, dominated by monogamous pair-bonding, a single sexual partner during a given ovulation cycle, and a paternal contribution to child rearing, is highly aberrant in the larger mammalian community.

So our conclusion in light of these findings is a bit counterintuitive. It’s not really kinky or forbidden behavior such as homosexuality, masturbation or even cross-species sex that makes humans sexually unique—those things are well-represented in our mammalian kin. Rather, it’s our most conventional and socially sanctioned mating behavior that is totally aberrant in comparison to other mammals.

Overall, in this case, page 99 gives a fairly good idea of the flavor of the book.

Learn more about the book and author at the official The Compass of Pleasure blog.

The Page 99 Test: David J. Linden's The Accidental Mind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Ellis Nutt's "Shadows Bright as Glass"

Amy Ellis Nutt has been a staff writer at The Star-Ledger newspaper in Newark, NJ since November 1997. She is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Nutt was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her story “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” which ran as a 20-page special section of The Star-Ledger in November 2010.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph, and reported the following:

Shadows Bright as Glass is all about the search for the soul. Jon Sarkin lost himself after a devastating stroke -- and he knew it. He was that rarest of individuals. He’d been radically altered in body, mind and spirit, and yet he understood intimately, painfully, all that he’d lost. His obsession with creating art was in part an acknowledgment of that loss and a desperate, almost primal attempt to figure out what had happened to his brain. Throughout the book, Jon’s experiences, his search for himself, mirrors the strange journey that science has taken in trying to answer that most fundamental of questions: Who are we? Page 99 takes the reader into Jon’s world several months after his stroke, when he’s finally returned home. Instead of his staid, button-down workaholic personality, he is flamboyant and impulsive and drawn to color. He is self-absorbed, wrapped up mostly in his own head, in part because the way he experiences the world, post-stroke, is so different from his former self. He is partly deaf, has constant double vision, cannot process multiple ideas simultaneously and has an almost child-like ability to be stimulated by the simplest things.

Excerpt from p. 99:

On another occasion, before he gave up driving, Sarkin decided to go to the florist himself. After spending $100 on crocus, tulip, an daffodil bulbs, he returned home and dug a couple of dozen small, randomly placed holes in the steeply banked backyard.

“Jon, what are you doing,” Kim asked?

“Don’t worry. It’s a surprise. Just wait until spring.”

In April, May and June, the yard exploded with a new color nearly every day – sudden bursts of lavender, yellow, orange, and red shooting out of the ground like slow-motion fireworks.

Learn more about the book and author at Amy Ellis Nutt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue