Henry Gee's "The Accidental Species"

Henry Gee is a Senior Editor of the science magazine Nature. His latest book is The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, in which he aims to correct the many misunderstandings which have crept into popular conceptions of evolution, in particular that of our own species. Previous books of nonfiction include Jacob’s Ladder: The History of the Human Genome; In Search of Deep Time; The Science of Middle-earth; Before The Backbone: Views on the Origin of the Vertebrates, and A Field Guide to Dinosaurs (the last with the artist Luis V. Rey.) He is also the author of science fiction trilogy The Sigil; the gothic horror mystery By The Sea, several short stories, and innumerable articles, mainly about science. His blog, The End Of The Pier Show, continues to delight its three regular readers. He lives in Cromer, Norfolk, England, with his family and numerous pets.

Gee applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Accidental Species and reported the following:

When I turned to page 99 I found that its theme was a kind of pre-echo of the very end of the book. If there is any talent we might call human, it is that of spotting patterns in the world around us. And from the patterns, we create stories. Even if the patterns are nonexistent, and the stories are unreliable.

So, much as we might indulge children who see elephants and railway trains in passing clouds, not to mention scoff at people who see images of Jesus in pieces of toast, everyone is at it – even scientists.

Then follows the tale of the astronomer Schiaparelli, who, peering through a glass darkly at Mars, saw a system of channels, or canali, where there were, in fact, none; an illusion that prompted American Percival Lowell to posit the massive irrigation ditches of an advanced civilization, dying of thirst; thence by easy stages to Wells’ War of the Worlds, Welles’ haunting radio adaptation and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stirring stories of John Carter and his adventures on Barsoom. All based, as it turned out, on illusion. For the canals of Mars do not exist, and never have existed.

So, not only are we good at spotting patterns, even if nonexistent ones, we tend to weave them into tales of what might otherwise be sets of disconnected and therefore worrying phenomena. This ability is so ingrained that it even haunts our subconscious. Things that go bump in the night are seamlessly woven into the stories we tell ourselves in dreams. It is easy to see how our ancestors, living much closer to nature, the unknown, and the reality of sudden and unexplained phenomena than we do nowadays, would hear thunder in the mountains and console themselves with stories of angry gods.

Seeing patterns. Telling stories.

And because telling stories is what we do, even without conscious intervention, it’s easy to underestimate how the power of narrative undermines our efforts to make sense of the past in any clear, cool or rational way.

Visit Henry Gee's The End Of The Pier Show blog and follow the author on Twitter.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Henry Gee & Heidi and Saffron.

--Marshal Zeringue

Orly Lobel's "Talent Wants to Be Free"

Orly Lobel is the Don Weckstein Professor of Law and founding member of the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Markets at the University of San Diego. She is the author of several books and numerous articles on behavioral law and economics, innovation policy, human capital, regulation and governance. A world traveler and internationally acclaimed scholar, Lobel has taught at Yale, Harvard, Tel-Aviv, and UCSD.

Lobel applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Talent Wants to Be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding, and reported the following:

Page 99 introduces the paradox of ethical market competition – we all want freewheeling fierce market battles but at the same time fear “the law of the jungle.” So page 99 asks, how do we draw the lines between honest commercial practices and unfair information leaks? Between healthy observation of one’s competitor and economic espionage? Between company proprietary information and free knowledge? Toward the end of page 99, I explain that precisely because of the moralistic tone embedded in the definition of trade secrets, they present unusual challenges and tensions, beyond those of any other area of intellectual property. Trade secrets are the workhorse of the information economy but they are also deeply misunderstood and if we don’t watch out we risk expanding the scope of secrecy in ways that will harm our quest for innovation and progress.

This core insight about the need to remain focused on the prize – on what actually motivates creativity, inventiveness, and performance, rather than stifling and stagnating our markets, threads throughout Talent Wants to Be Free. At every turn, we have to make sure we haven’t lost sight of our ultimate goals as we wage the war for talent and innovation. The book challenges orthodox economic assumptions and irrationalities and uncovers the best strategies for recruiting, nurturing, incentivizing and retaining talent. The book looks at how we fight over ideas, knowledge, and skill in every industry, profession, and region, examining the spread of non-competes, NDAs, patent and copyright pre-invention assignments, performance-based pay, and enhanced job mobility, and offers insights on how to best balance secrecy & sharing, carrots & sticks, freedom & control. Through empirical research, fascinating stories of invention and market battles, and insights from economics, psychology, law, and business, it argues that more frequently than we have come to believe, everyone - corporations, individuals, industries, and regions - benefits when talent is set free.

Learn more about the book and author at Orly Lobel's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Darrin M. McMahon's "Divine Fury"

Darrin M. McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University and the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment (2001) and Happiness: A History (2006).

McMahon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Divine Fury: A History of Genius, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens with a couplet by Edmond Halley, the astronomer of comet fame, which he penned for a eulogy of Isaac Newton:

Newton, that reach’d the insuperable line

The nice barrier twixt human and divine

Halley was undoubtedly a better astronomer than poet, but his line articulates nicely a growing 18th-century sentiment about the kind of figure Newton came to embody: the genius.

The genius emerged as a new model of the highest human type in the eighteenth century, and geniuses, as I try to show, came to occupy a space that lay precisely on the border between the human and the divine. Geniuses, that is, served a religious function, supplanting in the social imaginary the higher beings—prophets, apostles, angels, saints—who had long served as intercessors between the human and the divine and who were now increasingly marginalized in a world experiencing the drama of disenchantment. Geniuses were seen as wondrous beings—prodigies of nature, entirely original and distinct—endowed with the capacity to see where ordinary mortals could not: into the fabric of the universe or the fabric of our souls.

“Does he eat, drink and sleep like other men?” a French mathematician reportedly asked of Newton, in a line I cite on page 99. “I cannot believe otherwise than that he is a genius, or a celestial intelligence entirely disengaged from matter.” The comment may well have been apocryphal—the sort of mythic tale once told of the lives of the saints—but it is revealing nonetheless of the awe that Newton inspired. How fitting that when Newton died in 1727, his body was received at Westminster Abbey, traditional resting place of the saints. For he and others like him were conceived as higher beings, who like the saints of old, embodied human yearnings and fears, straddling the barrier twixt the human and the divine.

Visit the Divine Fury website and Darrin McMahon's website.

The Page 69 Test: Darrin McMahon's Happiness: A History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rahul Sagar's "Secrets and Leaks"

Rahul Sagar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy, and reported the following:

Secrets and Leaks examines a conundrum in political theory: state secrecy is vital for national security, but it can also be used to conceal wrongdoing. How then can we ensure that this power is used responsibly?

Page 99 finds us in the middle of Chapter 3. This chapter, entitled “Should We Rely on Congress?”, examines whether citizens ought to entrust the oversight of state secrecy to the legislature. The chapter starts by arguing that legislative oversight is confounded by executive privilege—the idea that the executive branch has the right to determine what national security information is shared with Congress. Having defended executive privilege as reasonable, I turn to examine whether an independent arbitrator—a court or a panel of experts—could be appointed to adjudicate between president and Congress with respect to the sharing of classified information. Starting on Page 99, I offer three reasons why such a “secrecy regulator” would prove problematic:

The first question we ought to ask here is what reason is there to believe that adjudges or independent experts are likely to prove reliable arbitrators. The answer, presumably, is that we expect these actors to make decisions based on reasons rather than interests. But what are the relevant sorts of reasons in the present context? Arguably, disputes about information sharing turn on questions of which branch has the most reasonable claim to the information under the circumstances.

Knowing which branch has the better claim in a given case will, I argue, require arbitrators to have deep political knowledge of the 'bigger picture'. For instance, they must know whether the president’s decision to withhold from Congress is really intended to conceal wrongdoing, as opposed to, say, hide a complex diplomatic maneuver from a loudmouth on the relevant congressional committee. How can external arbitrators, insulated from policy-making, be this prescient, I ask.

Moving on, I question the notion that arbitrators can make ‘objective’ judgments:

Furthermore even if the courts or an independent panel of experts are willing and able to take on the role of arbitrators, the notion that decisions concerning the distribution of national security information can be made apolitically is itself highly problematic.

The problem here is that ascertaining whether and when classified information should be shared with Congress requires the evaluation of costs and benefits that often cannot be estimated in any objective fashion. For instance—what will be the national security consequence of an inadvertent disclosure from Congress? An adjudicator who values public participation in decision-making will likely see the costs and benefits very differently from an adjudicator who prioritizes national security.

Finally, I note that even if arbitrators could have the knowledge and the objectivity to make ‘fair’ decisions about whether and when the president should be compelled to share classified information with Congress, the political valence of the decisions reached by these ‘secrecy regulators’ will eventually tempt political forces to ‘capture’ the office. How are citizens to know that these regulators have not been captured?

If a court or panel is to prevent unauthorized disclosures as effectively as the executive does, then it will likely have to create special forums where one or very few judges will examine the relevant materials in camera and ex parte. But if we take away the opportunity for external observers to study the basis of the decision reached by these judges or experts, how can we ascertain their disinterestedness?

The above was written before Edward Snowden recently disclosed information about some of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance operations. The realization that these operations were approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has provoked criticism of the legitimacy and utility of the FISC’s secret oversight process. This turn of events bears out the concern raised on Page 99—that ‘secrecy regulators’ do not provide a stable solution to the problem of state secrecy because it is only a matter of time before citizens and interest groups start to question the legitimacy of a ‘secrecy regulator’ whose decision-making is opaque to them.

Learn more about Secrets and Leaks at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Kalla's "Rising Sun, Falling Shadow"

Daniel Kalla's latest novels, The Far Side Of The Sky and Rising Sun, Falling Shadow, weave together intrigue, medical drama and romance to bring to life the extraordinary and little-known chapter of the Second World War, when the cultures of Europe and Asia converged.

Kalla applied the “Page 99 Test” to Rising Sun, Falling Shadow and reported the following:

It’s been a long time—2008 to be precise—since I last faced the page 99 test. And since then I’ve switched genres: from medical thrillers to historical fiction. So I was quite curious where the test would land me this time around in my latest novel, Rising Sun, Falling Shadow.

Rising Sun, Falling Shadow continues the story of Dr. Franz Adler and his newlywed wife, Sunny (Soon Yi), through the bleakest year of World War II in Shanghai. It’s 1943 and Allied citizens are herded into prison camps while tens of thousands of German Jews are crammed into a ghetto already teeming with impoverished Chinese. Franz is a secular Jewish surgeon from Vienna, while Sunny, a Shanghai native, is a Eurasian nurse whose father trained her to be a physician. Despite the constant threats and hostilities surrounding them, Franz and Sunny manage to keep the doors to the refugee hospital open, saving several lives in the process. But conflict comes from within and without for the Adlers. Against Franz's wishes, Sunny risks her life to help the cause of the local Resistance, which puts a strain on their own marriage. And a mysterious stranger, who is brought to the hospital on the brink of death, could pose an even greater threat to the family and the hospital.

Page 99 coincides with the opening of chapter 15. The patient—who turns out to be a Chinese general and one of the most effective freedom fighters in the wilds of “Free China”—is recovering from a gunshot wound to his leg. Sunny and Franz are desperate to get this most wanted fugitive out of the hospital and away from the ubiquitous Japanese soldiers in Shanghai. To that end, Sunny goes to see her best childhood friend, Jia Li, at her place of work to see if she will impose on her underworld connections to get the general out of Shanghai.

As always, Sunny felt strangely at home inside the brothel. She had visited Jia-Li intermittently at the Comfort Home since they were both teenagers. Most of the prostitutes welcomed Sunny like an old friend. The proprietor, Chih-Nii, had been playfully trying to recruit her for years. “Half Eastern, half Western, you would be a delicacy to both worlds,” the madam would say. “We could make a fortune together, my Eurasian buttercup.”

Ushi had escorted Sunny into the drawing room, then went in search of Jia-Li, leaving her alone on the chaise longue. Sunny studied the paintings that had belonged to the house’s original French owners, wondering again why the portraits still hung on the walls. Perhaps Chih-Nii thought they imbued the room with a sense of history or European flair? Sunny found them depressing. She was relieved not to have left any pictures of her family behind when she and Franz had been forced out her parents’ home. She cringed at the idea of someone using photographs of her parents to add character to her old home.

Jia-Li entered the room in a form-fitting, embroidered maroon cheongsam, slit up one side to the top of her thigh. Her bright lipstick was perfectly applied, and not a strand of hair was out of place, but to Sunny, Jia-Li was never quite as composed as she pretended to be at the Comfort Home. While Sunny was well aware of the circumstances that had forced her friend into this world, she never understood how someone as beautiful and intelligent could continue to sell her body. Or why, now that she had been free of the opium pipe for over a year, she still needed to. She thought about Jia-Li’s recent financial generosity toward the Adlers with another flush of guilt.

“I thought I was meeting you Thursday,” Jia-Li said as she kissed the air on either side of Sunny’s face.

Sunny took in the smells of cinnamon and jasmine. “I am sorry, bǎo bèi, this could not wait.”

Jia-Li lowered herself into the chair beside Sunny, lighting a cigarette as she did. She brought her lips to the holder and inhaled languidly, then broke into a luminous smile. “I welcome any visit from you, regardless of the reason, xiăo hè.”

“You might not say that after you hear me out.”

Visit Daniel Kalla's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Daniel Kalla.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary J. Bass's "The Blood Telegram"

Gary J. Bass is the author of Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. He is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. A former reporter for The Economist, he has written often for the New York Times, and has also written for The New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Slate, and other publications.

Bass applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, and reported the following:

The Blood Telegram is the secret story of an overlooked and shocking Cold War crisis, and about how America and India—two great democracies—dealt with it. In 1971, there was a devastating crackdown by the Pakistani army against the Bengalis of what was then East Pakistan, and is now Bangladesh. But rather than defending human rights, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his White House national security advisor, stood behind the Pakistani military government, even through this horrific killing campaign. From American and Indian archives, interviews with many of the key participants, and the White House tapes, the book is trying to show what really happened in the shadows.

On page 99, we’re following one of the main characters in the book, Sydney Schanberg, a hard-charging young reporter for The New York Times. He’s probably most familiar as one of the heroes of a terrific and harrowing movie, The Killing Fields, about him and his friend and colleague Dith Pran as they covered the murderous Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975. (Sam Waterston plays Syd, and really captures his intensity and brainpower.) So here we’re following a younger Syd, in his first war, as he’s reporting on the Pakistani army setting villages on fire.

While Nixon and Kissinger are backing Pakistan, there’s another big secret plan that’s unfolding: India is sponsoring Bengali guerrillas who are trying to mount an insurgency against Pakistani rule. On page 99, one of the most senior Indian officials is covertly planning guerrilla warfare against the Pakistan army to “bleed them.” So they’re on the road to a major war between India and Pakistan, which will drive Nixon and Kissinger to new heights of anti-Indian rage.

Learn more about The Blood Telegram at the Knopf website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott C. Johnson's "The Wolf and the Watchman"

Scott C. Johnson was a Newsweek foreign correspondent for twelve years, often providing exclusive war reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other fronts in the Middle East. He is now a freelance journalist and writer living in Oakland, California.

Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his 2013 National Book Award longlisted book, The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA, and reported the following:

On page 99 we see my father Keith Johnson, a career case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, shifting identities once again, this time into the Democratic challenger for the Washington State Senate.

Many people liked the idea of my father as a senator. He was handsome, intelligent, and articulate. Knowledgeable about the issues, he had, at times, an indefinable sense of bearing. He could be charismatic. Sometimes he was angry, too, and anger was good when it translated as political passion. He wanted to change things, shake them up. He was quick to choke up and become sentimental, and that too translated well as political theater.

This metamorphosis comes at a critical time in my father's life, and in mine. After 25 years in the Agency, my father had retired a few years earlier and was looking for new paths to pursue. I, meanwhile, had become a Newsweek foreign correspondent, and my father's life as a spy very quickly became the story I was most interested in understanding. The local reporters covering his political ascendency were similarly intrigued.

In a brief profile of my father, the Spokesman-Review described him as a "Spokane native" who the CIA had recruited in Mexico City in 1969. "He tracked Cold War Soviet activity in Yugoslavia, Southeast Asia and Spain," the article noted. "Fluent in Spanish, he worked on counterterrorism operations prior to the world exposition in Seville and the Barcelona Summer Olympics. He said he was also a trade representative for the U.S State Department and worked undercover, but declines to provide specifics."

"I can't get into operating procedures," my father told the reporter.

The spy-father and the journalist-son cross paths again and again as the narrative moves on. Sometimes these meetings are physical, such as in Sarajevo, Jordan or Mexico, where both continued to work, and sometimes they take place in conversations, letters and phone calls. The result, as I've tried to capture it, is a father-son story that spans sixty years, multiple continents and the morally hazardous terrain where secrecy and family meet betrayal and loyalty.

Learn more about the book and author at The Wolf and the Watchman website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Debora L. Spar's "Wonder Women"

Debora L. Spar is the president of Barnard College, a women’s undergraduate college affiliated with Columbia University. She received her doctorate in government from Harvard University and was the Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Spar is the author of numerous books, including Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Invention, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet and The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.

Spar applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, and reported the following:

I was a bit worried about what page 99 might hold. Because Wonder Women is a broad book, cutting across swathes of a woman’s life in ways that don’t necessarily hew to a particular structure.

So I was pleased to see that it did hold many of the book’s core themes. The page shows up in Chapter Four, the part of the book devoted to women’s beauty and stubborn body image. It’s a chapter that argues that, despite fifty years’ passage since the feminist and sexual revolutions; despite countless inspired arguments about the importance of valuing women for their brains and their skills and their spirits rather than their looks; despite women having surged into the workforce and across the tippy-top tiers of power, women still lavish extreme amounts of time and energy and money on the pursuit of physical perfection. We wax our legs. We paint our nails. We coif our hair before entering virtually any professional realm, and inject ourselves with potions and poisons to banish wrinkles from our brow.

It is easy, of course, to scoff at these exertions. We could, as individuals or a species, just stop the waxing, forget the manicures, and banish the blow-dryers. We could ignore the images of lithe seventeen year-olds trumpeted from the magazines and revel in own un-adorned selves. But as page 99 points out, we don’t. Instead, women across the world continue to invest – massively and perhaps irrationally – in their own physical appearances. As the page states:

We are the ones, ultimately who are choosing liposuction and boob jobs, who are nibbling on carrots and spinning like exhausted hamsters. We are the ones who still equate beauty with success and thinness, in particular, with goodness. Surely Oprah Winfrey doesn’t need to lose ten pounds (again) to prove her worth. Nancy Pelosi could probably handle both the House of Representatives and a few wrinkles. And I would almost certainly be better off if I skipped the gym every once in a while and slept in instead. But I don’t.

Maybe, the page wonders, women chase beauty because the media condemns us to. Or maybe we are simply programmed, like grooming cats or preening peacocks, to polish and strut our stuff.

In the end, though, I’m not sure it makes that much difference:

“Because even if women like me have been manipulated since childhood – even if we know in our heart of hearts that beauty is both foolish and fleeting – there is something that seems to propel us to want it. To want to be thin. To want to be flawless. To want to be wanted.”

Learn more about Wonder Women at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

E. Fuller Torrey's "American Psychosis"

E. Fuller Torrey is Executive Director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, MD, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

Torrey applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System, and reported the following:

Page 99 of American Psychosis begins with the story of Herbert Mullin who, in 1972, killed 13 people in a three-month period in Santa Cruz, California. Mullin suffered from schizophrenia and carried out the killings in response to his auditory hallucinations. Prior to the killings, Mullin had been hospitalized three times but then discharged with no further treatment or follow-up. As such, Mullin is representative of America’s failed mental illness treatment system and also representative of the story being told in American Psychosis.

People with severe mental illnesses who are not being treated, like Mullin, are responsible for ten percent of all American homicides but about half of all mass killings – Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, Washington Navy Yard, etc. People with severe mental illnesses who are not being treated also occupy approximately twenty percent of all jail and prison cells in the United States, and constitute about one-third of the homeless. Such people have also colonized public parks, public libraries, and train and bus stations.

American Psychosis is the story of how all of this came about. It opens with the saga of Rosemary Kennedy, originally only mildly retarded. However, when she then developed symptoms of psychosis as a young woman, her father had a lobotomy done on her; this left her profoundly retarded and was the single biggest tragedy to befall the Kennedy family. When her brother Jack later was elected President, the Kennedys vowed to honor Rosemary by implementing federal legislation for programs on mental illness and mental retardation.

This legislation included the Community Mental Health Centers program – poorly conceived and even more poorly implemented. The book details how this program failed from its inception and ultimately led to the failed public mental illness treatment system that exists today. The book closes with a chapter describing what needs to be done to fix the badly broken system.

The implementation of the federal Community Mental Health Centers program took place in 1963, exactly 50 years ago. American Psychosis is the history of the subsequent disaster, a disaster that is ongoing.

Learn more about American Psychosis at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Conroy's "Under the Wire"

Paul Conroy, author of Under the Wire: Marie Colvin's Final Assignment, is a former British soldier. As a photographer and filmmaker whose work spans 15 years, he has reported on the conflicts in Iraq, Congo, Kosovo, Libya, and Syria.

Conroy applied the “Page 99 Test” to Under the Wire and reported the following:

It was with a fair degree of trepidation that I opened the book at page 99. What would I find, would it be a fair representation of Under The Wire? I had been determined when writing to avoid any form of padding, I knew I was safe on that front, wasn't I?

I rolled a cigarette, brewed a fresh coffee and started to read, a huge sigh of relief, I was in luck. My page 99 turned out to be a pivotal point in our journey into the dark heart of the conflict in Syria. Baba Amr, a small neighborhood in Homs, was our goal. Homs had been under siege for weeks and all our efforts to date had been focused upon gaining entry to the dying city.

We had rested for a few days in a small village, 10km outside of Homs. The Free Syrian Army were looking after us, it was they who would facilitate our entry into Homs and, as we waited listening to the constant sound of the artillery barrage, we got told of the plan to take us into Homs via a 3km storm drain. We would enter Homs by one of the Free Syrian Army's best kept secrets, a tunnel used to resupply medicine, food and weapons. It was the city's last remaining lifeline to the outside world.

Page 99 finds us on the first leg of the journey into the city. Crossing illegally into Syria from Lebanon and the journey to our safe house, had seemed perilous enough, but now we felt the real fear, a tangible, physical fear as we crossed the plowed and rubble strewn fields. We were being led past government troop positions which peppered the route into the tunnel. Sniper rounds cracked through the air, the explosions could now be felt and the ground rumbled as the huge shells and rockets pulverized Homs.

It was bad enough trekking through the no mans land towards a tunnel we hadn't seen, with people we barely knew, in the knowledge that our destination was the most dangerous place on earth at that point in time. At this point in the book the adrenaline fueled elixir of emotions was something that I had never felt before, so very alive -- yet so close to death.

With hindsight I can look back at page 99 I realize that it was a major turning point, not just in our journey, but in both our lives. Marie and I, hands clasped together, trudged on though the mud and slippery ditches, were were walking into a living nightmare, a nightmare from which only one of us would return alive.
© 2013 Paul Conroy

Learn more about Under the Wire, and follow Paul Conroy on Twitter.

My Book, The Movie: Under the Wire.

--Marshal Zeringue