Benjamin Wardhaugh's "Poor Robin's Prophesies"

Benjamin Wardhaugh is a historian and writer. He is the author of several successful books about mathematics, music, and history, most recently the anthology of popular mathematics writing A Wealth of Numbers ("a unique book that is equal to far more than the sum of its parts").

His new book is Poor Robin's Prophesies: A Curious Almanac, and the Everyday Mathematics of Georgian England, an account of the wonderful world of popular mathematics in eighteenth-century Britain.

Wardhaugh applied the “Page 99 Test” to Poor Robin's Prophesies and reported the following:

From page 99:

I look upon Money itself to be a Commodity, which like others rises and falls as there is a demand for it.

There's a thought. It was written in 1726, by a man who'd come through the great financial disaster of the South Sea Bubble six years before, so he had every reason to know. His name was John Smart ('gent.'), and his book for accountants would be used in reprinted and plagiarized form for nearly two hundred years. I talk about a copy of the book whose owners included Frederick, Baron North and Edwin Bayford's Family Mourning Warehouse of Barnsley. Even an accountants' manual can go on an entertaining journey.

Despite projecting some self-confidence about prediction and control in his book, Smart knew perfectly well - don't we all? - that financial events take their own path. Money, like other things, 'rises and falls' according to whim, chance, fashion, and laws that no-one can know.

Smart's book and its story come in a chapter called 'My Scarbrough Expenses', a tour of everyday mathematics in use: keeping accounts, measuring fields, measuring beer barrels. The chapter title comes from an account-book kept by a young woman early in the eighteenth century. She wrote down every penny she spent at home and on her travels. Her trip to the spa town of Scarbrough involved gifts for the servants and 'the poor people', three shillings 'for going into the sea', and the splendid indulgence of '8 pound of Coffee'.

Although John Smart isn't the most important or the most charismatic of the people I talk about, page 99 does illustrate the themes that run throughout my book: mathematics with a human face; what it could do and what it couldn't do; where mathematics was and what it was doing in Georgian Britain. The Poor Robin of the title was the author of a long-running almanac, an annual calendar and book of general knowledge, full of bad jokes and silly rhymes, but also a route map for just that subject: everyday mathematics in Georgian Britain.

Learn more about the book and author at Benjamin Wardhaugh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Morris's "The Big Muddy"

Christopher Morris is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Vicksburg and Warren County, Mississippi, 1770-1860.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples, from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina, and reported the following:

On page 99 is an illustration of the Mississippi River at the mouth of the Red River. It was drawn in 1839 by an engineer named George Dunbar, who was a member of a team of engineers hired to improve the channel at this location. Forty years earlier the Spanish colonial governor of Louisiana, Manuel-Luis Gayoso de Lemos, had listened while his engineers told him of their plan to reduce flooding by shortening the river so that excess water could run more quickly to the Gulf of Mexico. The governor asked his engineers if they were certain of how the river would respond to their modifications. They were not, and so he asked them to leave it alone. In 1831, Henry Shreve and the US Army Corps of Engineers did precisely what the Spanish engineers had wanted to do, with the results Gayoso had feared. Shreve’s modifications had caused the channel between the Mississippi and the Red rivers to fill with silt, limiting steamboat passage. The Red River was at risk of becoming disconnected from the Mississippi. Dunbar was assigned the task of fixing Shreve’s mistake, but he never entirely succeeded.

As explained on page 99, “Six hundred years ago the Red and Ouachita Rivers merged to form the Atchafalaya, which flowed to the gulf independently of the Mississippi River. Four hundred years ago a Mississippi River meander loop cut into the intersection of the other rivers, and some portion of the Red River started flowing into the Mississippi while some portion of the Mississippi spilled into the Atchafalaya. In 1831, Henry Shreve and the US Army Corps of Engineers completed the cut-off Gayoso had refrained from undertaking.”

Today, about half the Mississippi flows into the Atchafalaya, and it would all go but for concrete structures put in place by the Army Corps of Engineers.

What happened in this location has happened to the Mississippi Valley more broadly. On the one hand, for centuries people living in the valley have altered the course of the Mississippi River. On the other hand, the Mississippi has a history of doing its own thing. People may change it, but it is quite capable of changing on its own. There have always been people who understood this, the last Spanish governor being an example, and there have always been people, such as Henry Shreve, who instead believed they could tame the Mississippi and make it serve human purposes.

Participating in the ongoing debates over the reconstruction of New Orleans post-Katrina and the future of the Mississippi Valley are many Manuel Gayosos and Henry Shreves.

Learn more about The Big Muddy at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bernadette Barton's "Pray the Gay Away"

Bernadette C. Barton (Ph.D. University of Kentucky 2000) is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Morehead State University. She is the author of Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers (2006) and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (2012). Barton writes and lectures on contemporary issues of gender, sexuality, religion, and the sex industry.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Pray the Gay Away and reported the following:

Page 99 in my book Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays features Elena’s tale of negotiating what I call the “toxic closet.” Here, I theorize the toxic closet as a “condition of inarticulation” and explore multiple ways that the climate of the Bible Belt makes discussions of homosexuality and same-sex relationships difficult. Closeted gay people change pronouns, avoid discussions of anything personal, and in general tend to be skilled at either re-directing or rebuffing questions that might out them. Gay people who come out, and want to be out, often find themselves forced to manage homophobic family members. They usually lack role models, like Elena who is Hispanic, 20, from El Paso, Texas and a member of a big Catholic family. Elena came out to her family in stages. At each stage family members tried to manage who she told and how. The only family role model Elena had to use as a gauge for coming out was her cousin Maurice. Elena said, “he’s gay. We think he’s gay. He brings his friend to all the family parties. It was always like, okay, but not really talked about because everybody knew that he was gay, but the older generation didn’t really want to talk about it.” The message Elena received from her cousin’s experience was “We aren’t going to talk about it, but everyone knows.” This “don’t ask, don’t tell” climate permeates homes, workplaces, schools and churches in the Bible Belt.

I am often asked what inspired me to interview Bible Belt gays like Elena and write Pray the Gay Away. While I have lived in Kentucky for the past 20 years, I am originally from Massachusetts and have family in both New England and California. Indeed, I arrived in Kentucky fresh from a year and a half living in San Francisco. I came out in Lexington, Kentucky and quickly found community and support. It was not until my partner and I moved to a small town outside Lexington that I began to notice homophobia. Pray the Gay Away opens with a neighbor calling homosexuality an abomination to me in my own backyard after I shared that I was a lesbian. This incident coupled with the daily homophobic headlines during the 2004 presidential election season piqued my curiosity and dismay. I believe the best research is motivated by a genuine desire to figure something out. In my case, I wanted to understand the very foreign conservative Christian mind frame to better comprehend the lives of Bible Belt gays.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbians and gay men, observation, and content analysis, in Pray the Gay Away I unpack how conservative Christian ideology reproduces homophobic attitudes and show how Bible Belt gays navigate these attitudes in daily life. What I call “Bible Belt Christianity” in Pray the Gay Away is not confined to religious institutions and Sunday worship. Rather, Christian crosses, messages, paraphernalia, music, news and attitudes saturate everyday settings where residents live, work, socialize, and worship. The Bible Belt gays featured in Pray the Gay Away - like Elena who delicately negotiated family land mines as she came out and was blamed when there was an explosion - have insider perspectives on Bible Belt Christianity. On the front lines of the culture wars in the United States, daily interacting with conservative Christians, Bible Belt gays offer readers hard-won insights in Pray the Gay Away. As Terry, a white lesbian who is 29 and from Eastern Kentucky explained, “We speak fundamentalist Christianity. We are interpreters and liaisons. We know that fundamentalists are not crazy. They are wrong. And there is a difference.”

Learn more about the book and author at Bernadette C. Barton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sianne Ngai's "Our Aesthetic Categories"

Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at Stanford University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls near the end of my chapter on the cute. Earlier I’ve suggested that as a commodity aesthetic, cuteness poses an interesting problem—you could even say, an embarrassment—for twentieth-century and contemporary American poetry. Not for all of poetry, of course, but certainly for a major vein preoccupied with what Hannah Arendt disparagingly calls the “small things” of everyday life. I then show how some poets reflexively take up poetry’s unusually fraught relation to cuteness in ways that make aspects of the commodity aesthetic newly visible, revealing it to be more complicated than we might otherwise assume. Poets like Gertrude Stein and Bob Perelman, for example, underscore how there’s a layer of aggression and even sadism involved in our experience of things as cute. Cute things seem to get even cuter when they seem injured or distressed, as critics like Lori Merish and Daniel Harris have also noted. Related to this is the fact that cute things also seem cutest when they are speechless or cannot talk; Hello Kitty, for instance, doesn’t even have a mouth. Muteness is thus a distinctive motif of the cute, as brought out in a unique way by poetry that tries in some fashion to engage with this mass-cultural, kitsch aesthetic rather than simply recoiling from it in horror.

On page 99 you’ll see me linking this cute motif to something the aesthetic philosopher Theodor Adorno says about poetry, which is that it is a kind of “nonconceptual” and therefore “silent” or noncommunicative language. Adorno connects this enigmatical muteness of poetry (its resistance to concepts) to something else he calls “mimesis” or “mimetic comportment.” This refers to the assimilation of a subject to an object (as opposed to, say, the subject’s subsumption of the object under a concept), which Adorno elsewhere likens to the way in which children play at being inanimate things. Cuteness, significantly, is a mimetic aesthetic too—think here of the way in puppies and babies push us into producing baby talk, forcing us to imitate their infantile qualities in the language of our aesthetic evaluation. What poetry brings out about the aestheticization of powerlessness that is cuteness—and its surprisingly powerful effects on language, in particular—can thus be used in turn, I argue, to help us better understand some of the most difficult passages about art and aesthetic experience in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.

Learn more about Our Aesthetic Categories at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Glen Pettigrove's "Forgiveness and Love"

Glen Pettigrove is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He is the author of a number of articles in moral and political philosophy, and his work has appeared in leading journals including the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Religious Studies.

Pettigrove applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Forgiveness and Love, and reported the following:

At least since the time of Plato, philosophers have been investigating 1) how things that appear to be different are, in fact, similar and 2) how things that appear similar are importantly different. Page 99 of Forgiveness and Love finds me up to my elbows in the second task, as a sentence in the first full paragraph nicely illustrates: ‘Here again there are several distinct questions that one might be asking that need to be disambiguated.’ As such, the 99th page is fairly representative of the book as a whole.

Earlier chapters have been looking at what unites various things that go by the name of forgiveness. They examine what forgiveness is, what it is about, and who has the standing to do it. Chapters 4 and 5, while not abandoning this first task, shift the emphasis to the second. Chapter 4 takes its inspiration from the old adage, ‘To understand is to forgive,’ and examines several different things that go by the name of understanding, looking at how each of them might encourage forgiving (or not). Chapter 5, which is where the 99th page falls, explores the remarkable complexities of the relationship between forgiveness and love.

One reason for engaging in the philosopher’s tasks is to improve our understanding of ourselves and our world. And since we – and the people with whom we live – are regular offenders (falling short of any number of moral standards), the activities and emotions related to forgiveness are certainly worth trying to understand. But our interest is not limited to what we are like. It also extends to the question of how we ought to be. The 99th page falls at the point in the book where I begin to shift attention from descriptive issues to normative ones. In this respect, too, page 99 is representative of the whole. It draws on observations made in earlier chapters and points forward to the themes of later ones, where I look at when it is permissible or impermissible, commendable or objectionable to forgive. The hope is that by the time the reader reaches page 99 – and certainly by the time she reaches page 159 – she will have a better grasp of the extraordinarily complicated thing(s) we call forgiveness and a clearer sense of why it matters.

Learn more about Forgiveness and Love at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Thomas Chamberlin's "The Global Offensive"

Paul Chamberlin received his PhD from The Ohio State University after studying at the American University of Cairo and the University of Damascus and has held fellowships at Yale University and Williams College. His dissertation won the 2010 Oxford University Press prize for the best dissertation in international history.

Chamberlin's first book, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order, is an international history of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Global Offensive and reported the following:

Because my page 99 is an illustration, I took the liberty of flipping to page 100. This page begins with a discussion of the prickly matter of “terrorism” as viewed in the late 1960s. Palestinian guerillas had begun hijacking jetliners, creating headaches for U.S. and Israeli leaders who were now confronting a new kind of threat. As I explain, Palestinian fighters had found a new transnational space in which to wage their revolutionary warfare. While they lacked the firepower of nation-states like Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, Palestinian revolutionaries could exploit international aviation networks as a new staging ground for their liberation struggle.

As American and Israeli officials discovered, this new form of revolutionary war proved exceedingly difficult to control. If Israel was attacked by units from the Jordanian army, for example, the Israeli military could easily retaliate by attacking Jordanian military forces or other institutions of the Jordanian state. The problem with Palestinian hijackings – or “international terrorism” more broadly – was that there was no easy target to retaliate against. Palestinian fighters were based in Beirut and commanded from Amman; they received funds from the People’s Republic of China and training in Algeria, and they attacked aircraft in Switzerland. The government of Israel sought to solve this dilemma by striking at suspected Palestinian bases and at the states that “harbored” the guerillas, not unlike an early version of the post-9/11 Bush Doctrine.

This tactic rankled U.S. State Department officers however, who argued that military reprisals against Lebanon were far too blunt a weapon to address the delicate problem of Palestinian attacks. Indeed, the Lebanese government – perched precariously on the brink of the civil war that would break out in 1975 – was doing everything in its power to rein in the attacks short of touching off a conflict that might destroy their state. Israeli military reprisals that failed to distinguish between the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, and the Lebanese government only seemed to make matters worse, from the perspective of American foreign service officers. Of course, this conflation of Palestinian guerillas and Arab governments fit into long-standing tendencies by outsiders to homogenize the peoples of the Middle East that have survived to the present day. Ultimately, this failure to recognize the differences between various guerilla factions and between the guerillas and Palestinians in general would complicate attempts to find a political solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Learn more about The Global Offensive at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Jay Dolin's "When America First Met China"

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; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. 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, When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail, and reported the following:

When America First Met China traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China. Indeed, the furious trade in furs, opium, and bêche-de-mer—a rare sea cucumber delicacy—might have catalyzed America's emerging economy, but it also sparked an ecological and human rights catastrophe of such epic proportions, the reverberations can still be felt today. Peopled with fascinating characters-from the "Financier of the Revolution" Robert Morris to the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who considered foreigners inferior beings—When America First Met China explores a time many years ago when the desire for trade and profit first brought America to China’s door.

By the time the reader reaches 99 of the book, the Empress of China, the first American ship to sail to China, had already blazed the trail, and in her wake, an increasing number of American merchants sent their own ships to China to purchase tea, silk, and porcelain. Indeed, between 1784 and the end of the War of 1812, in 1814, nearly three hundred American ships made a total of 618 voyages to Canton.

One thing that nearly all American ships engaged in the China trade had in common was their relatively small size. Whereas the vessels the Europeans sent to Canton, called East Indiamen, were quite large, with British ships averaging twelve hundred tons, their American counterparts, befitting their scrappy upstart origins, were almost all less than five hundred tons, and many were below two hundred, making them Lilliputians among giants.
On page 99, however, we are introduced to one of the few exceptions to the rule – the behemoth, Massachusetts.

From page 99:

One of the few American ships in these early years that approached the size of the European ships fared poorly, not because of its size but rather due to poor planning. Soon after returning to China in 1786, Shaw hatched a plan with Randall to build a magnificent ship for the China trade, and they sent orders back to the states to begin construction. The end result was the Massachusetts, which at 820 tons was the largest American merchant ship built up to that point. Launched in September 1789, and then moved from the shipyard in Braintree to Boston, the Massachusetts “excited a considerable sensation in the commercial part of the community,” recalled Amasa Delano, its second officer (a distant relative of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt). “Parties of people in every rank of society frequently came on board of her to gratify their curiosity and express their admiration.”

The ship’s departure was curiously delayed due to Moll Pitcher, a fortuneteller of considerable fame from Lynn, Massachusetts, who predicted that all the men who shipped out on the Massachusetts would be lost at sea. As a result panic-stricken crewmembers, always prone to believe in rumors and portents kept leaving, and it wasn’t until the third entire crew was signed on that the men stayed put. “It seems strange,” Delano observed, “that a class of men, who are continually exposed to storms hardships, and dangers, should be so powerfully affected by the traditions which are handed down from generation to generation concerning omens, charms, predictions, and the agency of invisible spirits.”

Learn more about the book and author at Eric Jay Dolin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Fur, Fortune, and Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas K. McCraw's "The Founders and Finance"

Thomas K. McCraw is Straus Professor of Business History Emeritus at Harvard Business School. In addition to his new book, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy, McCraw's publications include Prophets of Regulation, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and his biography Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, which won four other prizes and is available in six languages.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Founders and Finance and reported the following:

The page 99 test works extremely well for The Founders and Finance. U.S. debt and deficit problems are bad enough today, but they were much worse when the nation was founded in 1776, more than 230 years ago. At that time, the country was bankrupt and vulnerable to disintegration. This book is about how immigrant financial experts devised a series of ways to rescue the economy. The key to the story is Alexander Hamilton's solution to the debt problem, and page 99 comes in the middle of a four-page passage detailing the heart of that story.

The United States government started out with very little money and almost immediately went broke. Its War of Independence from Britain forced it to borrow from banks in Holland and to wheedle large sums from France, Britain's historic rival. The Continental Congress had no power to tax, so it continually asked the 13 new "Free and Independent States" -- as the Declaration of Independence calls them -- for financial support that they were either unable or unwilling to provide. Both the Continental Congress and the state governments sold reams of bonds to help finance the war and printed huge stacks of currency. The value of the bonds quickly depreciated and most of the currency lost its value and became "not worth a Continental." There seemed no way out. The Revolution might well have failed because of financial problems alone.

Nobody in America knew how to manage a national economy because there had been no nation. Nobody had any experience with large-scale finance because there had never been a bank in the 13 colonies and there were none in the new states. There was lots of expertise in managing land and slaves, reflected in the prominence of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison in the forming of the new government. All three were major Virginia tobacco planters, but none had much familiarity with the tools of finance: bonds, currency, banks, and public credit. Neither did other founders such as John Adams, who grew up on a farm in Massachusetts and distrusted banks.

Enter such immigrants as Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and Albert Gallatin. Morris came from Liverpool at the age of 13, Hamilton from the Danish West Indies at 15, and Gallatin from Geneva at 19. None fit the later image of immigrants as tired, huddled masses or wretched refuse. None had an agrarian frame of mind and each -- unlike the vast majority of native-born Americans -- had grown up in a city. All were extremely bright and energetic, with a special aptitude for numbers. Morris and Hamilton had spent their teens working in merchant houses dealing with international trade, and Gallatin had led his math classes at elite academies in Geneva. As the War of Independence wore on, Congress appointed Morris as Superintendent of Finance, and he did an outstanding job. But he was frustrated by the government's inability to tax, a problem solved only after the adoption of the Constitution in 1788.

The percentage of immigrants in the total population was only about half what it is today, and the odds against three "aliens" -- Morris, Hamilton, and Gallatin -- becoming the three leading financial executives of the early Republic were prohibitive. Yet that is what happened. It is a tribute to the wisdom of George Washington for appointing Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury twice, and to that of Jefferson and Madison for appointing Gallatin four times. Of the three immigrants, the most important was Hamilton, who conceived and executed a plan so audacious, and so difficult to get through Congress, that we must regard his achievement as the most dazzling economic performance of any public official in U.S. history.

Hamilton's three-pronged strategy was: (1) to "fund" (refinance) the existing debt at its face value, so as to restore the creditworthiness of the country; (2) to "assume" (transfer to the federal government) all state debts, in order to gain first call over tax receipts; and (3) to create a Bank of the United States, which would issue a vast amount of new currency and increase the nation's money supply. The Bank would have branches in all major cities.

Hamilton's plan was widely admired during the two centuries after he presented it. But, incredibly, only in the last few years have the true -- and shocking -- numbers he was dealing with been discovered, in the archives of a Dutch bank that lent money to the United States. (Professor Richard Sylla of NYU made this discovery.) During Hamilton's first full year in office, 1790, the nation's debt-to-income ratio was a crushing 46 to 1 (today, by comparison, it's 6.6 to one). Five years later, in 1794, after the prosperity resulting from Hamilton's program, the ratio had shrunk to 15 to 1. By 1800 it was only 8.6 to one, and the United States enjoyed one of the highest credit ratings of any country on earth. This is a big reason why Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin was able to finance the $15 million Louisiana Purchase, one of the epic events in the nation's history.

Hamilton and Gallatin were political enemies, but they shared many of the same views, like most of the other immigrants discussed in The Founders and Finance. They actively opposed slavery. They favored the Bank of the United States. They supported federal aid to "internal improvements" (roads and canals), and federal promotion of manufacturing. They always thought in a framework of the national interest, favoring no particular state or region. Here they differed from most native-born Americans, who were tied tightly to their home states by bonds of family, heritage, and the ownership of land. These powerful local loyalties persisted for many decades after the Revolution. Not until after the Civil War of the 1860s was the nation commonly spoken of in the singular: the United States is rather than the United States are.

Compared to most native-born Americans, the immigrants Morris, Hamilton, and Gallatin thought of the United States in the singular almost from the beginning. Tied only loosely to any particular state, they remained personally rootless. The saw financial capital as rootless, too, as it is in fact -- movable, portable, migratory in the same sense that they themselves were. For the first two generations of U.S. history, these immigrants and others like them influenced national financial policy much more strongly than citizens born in the thirteen colonies did. And over the next two hundred years, their ideas formed much of the framework for American development -- a story of sustained economic success that has no parallel in any other country. The Founders and Finance shows how those ideas evolved and were first put into practice.

Read more about The Founders and Finance at the Harvard University Press website.

The Page 69 Test: Thomas K. McCraw's Prophet of Innovation.

--Marshal Zeringue

David J. Hess's "Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy"

David J. Hess is Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalization (2007) and Localist Movements in a Global Economy: Sustainability, Justice, and Urban Development in the United States (2009), and many other books.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy: Making and Keeping New Industries in the United States, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

By 2000, the United States was facing severe economic pressures on its manufacturing industries from newly industrializing countries. China became both the symbol of the shifts in the world economic system and a target of claims that its gains were based on the manipulation of trade agreements to the benefit of its export industries and the detriment of American manufacturers… Although the rivalry with China went well beyond the issue of green manufacturing, one should also not underestimate the importance of energy transitions to global economic hegemony.

Many people have recognized two fundamental, historical changes that are occurring during the twenty-first century—the broad shift of the center of the world economy to Asia in general and especially to China, and the slow but general transition to a low-carbon economy—but how are these two changes related to each other? In this book I follow the fortunes of the convergence of industrial and environmental policy in the United States. At first largely a state-government phenomenon, the convergence became a central part of the initiatives of the first two years of the Obama administration. The president promised five million green jobs, and he linked the greening of the economy to the economic stimulus package.

However, instead of embracing a bipartisan, national initiative that brought together job creation and the greening of the economy, the Republican Party mounted a full assault on the green-energy transition. By the 2012 election cycle, Republican presidential candidates were openly voicing skepticism about climate change, and although some Democratic governors continued to push for the ongoing convergence of industrial and environmental policy, the president backed away from the green jobs rhetoric that had characterized the 2008 election.

As the U.S. failed to assume world leadership for the renewable energy transition, China’s position in this arena continued to improve. That country supported the development of its renewable energy sector with strong demand policies, and it also provided substantial loans and other support to its growing photovoltaic industry, even to the point of violating trade agreements.

These current events are linked to long-term tectonic shifts in the global economy. My book explores how the neoliberal ideology of market fundamentalism that is so prominent in anti-green politics in the U.S. is poorly adapted to the rising competition from newly industrializing countries. As the full effect of the changes in the global economy become more evident, the U.S. will need to borrow more from the industrial and trade policies of those countries. The change requires a vigorous industrial policy and a more defensive posture with respect to trade. The debate over China and its increasing dominance of the manufacturing for renewable energy is one site that explore for the shift toward a more developmentalist approach to economic policy in the U.S.

Learn more about Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy at the MIT Press website and David J. Hess' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronald Hendel's "The Book of 'Genesis': A Biography"

Ronald Hendel is the Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor in chief of The Oxford Hebrew Bible and the author of Remembering Abraham and Reading Genesis.

Hendel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Book of "Genesis": A Biography, and reported the following:

With some trepidation I turn to page 99, not knowing what I’ll find. The page begins with a quote within a quote: “‘I am God and no other god exists except me,’ since he is ignorant of the place from which his strength had come.” This strange quote is from the Secret Revelation of John, which is an ancient Gnostic retelling of the Genesis creation story. In this daring – and soon to be declared heretical – new revelation, the God who creates the world is an ignorant and evil god, who is unaware of the existence of other – and higher – gods. (His misguided statement is actually a paraphrase of the First Commandment.) Page 99 explains: “In other words, Yaldabaoth is the God of the Bible, but in the Gnostic revision he is a weak and deceived God, since he does not know the perfect God. The luminous and perfect God is in the world above, a Platonic world of pure understanding.” After the ignorant God creates an earthly Adam, the perfect God above creates an antidote to earthly ignorance: “Then the high God above has mercy on Adam, and sends him ‘luminous Thought,’ who is the ideal form of Eve.” This luminous Eve is the revealer of wisdom, who teaches the “knowledge of good and evil” to humans in order to liberate them from the material world.

Well, it seems that page 99 takes us directly into the drama of the life of Genesis, as the Gnostic seers reimagine Genesis through their understanding of the burdens of the world and the possibilities of transcendence. By the way, this Gnostic text is one of the famous “Gnostic Gospels” found in the Egyptian desert in 1945, so this chapter in the life of Genesis is a relatively recent discovery. I don’t think they teach you this stuff at Sunday school.

This page is a good sample of the book, which addresses the ways that the book of Genesis has lived and changed in the western religious imagination, starting with the writing of the biblical books and ending with modern times – with the uneasy relationship of Genesis and science, literary reinterpretations of Genesis (by Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, and others), and the turn to reading Genesis as literature. The book is in a series called “Lives of Great Religious Books.”

Learn more about The Book of "Genesis" at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue