Patrick Allitt's "A Climate of Crisis"

Patrick N. Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University. He was an undergraduate at Oxford in England, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and Princeton University. At Emory since 1988, he teaches courses on American intellectual, environmental, and religious history, on Victorian Britain, and on the Great Books.

Allitt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Climate of Crisis explains the controversy over the trans-Alaska pipeline that divided Americans in the 1970s. The discovery of oil on the North Slope of Alaska in the late sixties had raised the prospect of the United States being less dependent on oil imports from politically volatile Middle East. But how could Alaskan oil be conveyed safely to the lower forty-eight states? Icebergs in the Arctic Ocean made it impossible for tanker ships to sail there.

A pipeline to the ice-free ports of southern Alaska was the favored solution. It would carry oil 800 miles, over two great mountain ranges, over major rivers like the Yukon, and across earthquake faults. A technically challenging project, dauntingly expensive, it also offended environmentalists who believed it would create a scar on the pristine landscape and interrupt caribou migration routes.

It might never have won political approval had it not been for the Yom Kippur War of 1973 between Israel and its neighbors. When the U.S. supported Israel, the oil-exporting Arab nations retaliated first by cutting off oil exports altogether and later by doubling their asking price. Alaskan oil suddenly seemed a lot more desirable, and the pipeline got a green light from both houses of Congress.

It was finished in 1977 and oil began to flow from the North Slope to Port Valdez, where it was loaded aboard tanker ships heading for refineries in Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles, and San Diego. One of these ships, the Exxon Valdez, ran aground in 1989 and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound and the surrounding waters. The pipeline itself, by contrast, has had a largely trouble-free existence and is still going strong today.

The book is a history of the great environmental controversies of the last 65 years. It starts by recalling widespread popular fears about nuclear fallout in the 1950s, and moves on to consider population, pollution, environmental carcinogens, resource depletion, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, endangered species, contaminated waste sites, environmental racism, ecotourism, genetically modified foods, and global warming. In each case it shows how intelligent people disagreed about the gravity of the issues and about how best to respond to them.

The theme of the book is that these problems were real but manageable, and that once the nation dedicated itself to remedying them it was often successful. As a result of sensible environmental legislation, we live in a far less polluted environment than our parents and grandparents, enjoy better health and greater life expectancy. We need to continue to take environmental problems seriously but we do not need to fear a coming apocalypse, as some environmental writers have implied.

Learn more about A Climate of Crisis at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Conservatives.

Writers Read: Patrick Allitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Caro May's "The Map of Enough"

Molly Caro May is a writer and teacher of place-based writing workshops. Her work has appeared in Salon, Feministing, Orion, Fourth Genre, among others. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.

May applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Map of Enough: One Woman's Search for Place, and reported the following:

This page is a culmination page, only three pages away from the end of Chapter Three. After three months of constructing the yurt, Chris and I are finally erecting it—in a below-freezing blizzard, with our dog Bru wrapped in a down jacket. Wind comes up. It blows our gear down. It blows us down. So we slide down the hill, hop in our Jeep and go driving to wait it out. When we return, the white landscape seems a different place than the one we arrived in during the summer. I reflect back on the woman I was then, the woman I am now, the woman I will be.

On our return, as we drove back up the snow-packed driveway, the white tugged me back to our first dark night on The Land about half a year ago. How distant the wild green grass seemed now, how distant that woman standing in the wild green grass seemed, like an old tattered photograph our great-great-grandchildren would find in a closet one day and know about, how more distant she would become even to the woman wondering about her now.

Once the yurt frame is up, the wind whips up again and we have to wait until the following morning to wrap it in canvas. We pause before descending back down the hill. I see it as an animated creature now. Where there had been nothing but trees and grass, there is now a structure, a focus, at least for us humans. The page ends with the word “never” which is wildly appropriate. Maps have guided much of my life and, in this moment, I realize that Montana had never come to me on a map, and yet, here I was.

“We stood and stared at a new presence—the brown skeleton against a white landscape. My younger self who planned to translate languages had never found Montana on a map, never…”

Visit Molly Caro May's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan K. Balot's "Courage in the Democratic Polis"

Ryan K. Balot is Professor of Political Science and Classics at the University of Toronto.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Courage in the Democratic Polis: Ideology and Critique in Classical Athens, and reported the following:

Courage in the Democratic Polis explores the ancient Athenians’ ideal of courage – an ideal that displaced heroic conceptions and emphasized the cognitive and democratic elements of courage. Page 99 explains the connection between isêgoria (“free and equal speech”) and courage. Isêgoria, I argue, “enabled the Athenians to think carefully about their expressions of courage, to see just what courage demanded in each situation, and to think beyond traditional norms and practices” (page 99). Athenian courage was characterized by thoughtfulness and informed by democratic deliberation. In these ways, it differed from courage as expressed among Athens’ non-democratic rivals, such as Sparta, Persia, and Macedon. The central idea that courage varied by regime type emerges clearly on page 99.

Page 99 also captures two other prominent themes. First, it describes the emotions that shaped Athenian courage, such as “eagerness” (prothumia) and an appropriate “sense of shame.” While virtually all theorists oppose courage to fear, most contemporary philosophers neglect the emotions that inform and motivate courage. Second, page 99 foreshadows my argument that the Athenian democrats prized courage as intrinsically good and meritorious – indeed, as partly constitutive of human flourishing – even while recognizing the natural superiority of justice and of practical wisdom.

Ancient Athenian discourse and practice challenge us, as democratic citizens, to rethink our own most basic ethical ideas and political aspirations. To see why, however, you will need to read through to page 408.

Learn more about Courage in the Democratic Polis at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Tarnoff's "The Bohemians"

Ben Tarnoff has written for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers.

Tarnoff applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Bohemians, a twenty-four-year old poet named Ina Coolbrith rides a streetcar to the end of the line. The last stop is North Beach, which in today’s San Francisco describes a stretch of strip clubs and bad Italian restaurants trafficked chiefly by tourists and perverts, but which in the San Francisco of 1865 described a tranquil stretch of actual beach overlooking the water. “How grand the Bay looks with its white waves dashing on the shore,” Coolbrith wrote, “and stern old Alcatraz yonder, standing like a tried and faithful sentinel keeping watch and ward over the hidden treasures of the deep.”

Alcatraz kept watch over more than the hidden treasures of the deep. In 1865, it was the site of a heavily fortified Union garrison, ready to repel a Confederate incursion that never arrived. The Civil War never came to California. The fighting was always far away. In the 1860s, San Francisco enjoyed a decade of peace and prosperity, luxuriating in its metropolitan grandeur, flexing its imperial muscle as the financial, commercial, and industrial powerhouse of the Far West. It also boasted a thriving literary scene to which Coolbrith belonged, along with Charles Warren Stoddard, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. While the rest of the country was busy killing each other, these four writers would create a Bohemian moment that would invigorate the region, fascinate the country, and change the course of American literature.

View the trailer for The Bohemians, and visit Ben Tarnoff's website.

Writers Read: Ben Tarnoff.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Buchanan's "American Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean During World War II"

Andrew Buchanan is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Vermont. He received his PhD and MA in History from Rutgers University, and earned his BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Buchanan has taught American history, global history, and various military history courses. He has published articles on various aspects of the diplomatic, military, and cultural history of World War II in publications including the Journal of Contemporary History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Global War Studies.

Buchanan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean during World War II, and reported the following:

Half of my page 99 is occupied by a picture—one of several throughout the book, many reproduced for the first time, that help to bring this work of political, military and economic history to life. In this case, it features a dinner hosted by President Roosevelt for the Sultan of Morocco during the Anglo-American conference at Casablanca in January 1943. The Sultan was not included in the conference, but Roosevelt took advantage of his visit to the country to offer the Moroccan leader what appeared to be promises of American support for his country’s independence. At best, however, the President’s words were ambiguous: while pledging U.S. support for eventual Moroccan independence, both Roosevelt and his advisers worked to assure French officials of their support for ongoing colonial rule. An exploration of this contradiction, which saw Washington’s verbal endorsement of national self-determination matched by its actual backing for European imperial power, runs throughout this volume.

My book does much more than simply discuss this vexed issue: it situates it within a broader narrative of American power into the Mediterranean during World War II. The United States, I argue, developed a consistent orientation towards this critical region. Anyone familiar with conventional narratives of the war will immediately recognize the uniqueness of this approach. America is generally presented as a reluctant participant in the wartime Mediterranean, inveigled into the region by the wily British, and keen to escape as soon as possible. But for a power only begrudgingly engaged in the Mediterranean, the United States did remarkably well. By 1945, the Mediterranean was an American lake, and the predominance of U.S. military power was matched by increasing political and economic influence. In examining this multifaceted reality, my book offers a radical revision to long-predominant narratives of the war in the Mediterranean.

Read more about American Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean during World War II at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Townsend's "Mission at Nuremberg"

Tim Townsend, formerly the religion reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, holds master's degrees from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Divinity School. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. In 2005, 2011, and 2013, he was named Religion Reporter of the Year by the Religion Newswriters Association, the highest honor on the "God beat" at American newspapers. He recently joined the Pew Research Center's Religion and Public Life Project as a senior writer and editor in Washington, D.C.

Townsend applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis, and reported the following:

In the summer of 1945, the Allies sent captured high-level Nazi officials to an interrogation center – a former hotel called The Palace – in the spa town of Mondorf-les-Bains in southeastern Luxembourg.

On page 99 of Mission at Nuremberg, we meet Colonel Burton Andrus, the commandant of the interrogation center, codenamed “Ashcan,” and get a description of Ashcan itself.

The former hotel, now stripped of anything luxurious, and equipped to stop suicides, held dozens of Hitler’s former lieutenants, including more than half the men who would, by fall, be standing trial in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity.

The war may have been over, but Andrus feared residual forces might try to free the Nazi leaders from Allied control, and he wasn’t satisfied with Ashcan’s defenses when he arrived. He requested floodlights, an airstrip, an electric alarm system for the outer fence, guns, and more guards, doctors, clerks, and typewriters. GIs carried out fine carpets and elegant furniture, replacing them with folding camp-beds and straw mattresses. Others removed chandeliers and replaced sixteen hundred of the hotel’s glass windowpanes with Pleixglas and iron bars.

“I was concerned about guards being bribed, snipers shooting at prisoners or gaining information, and suicide attempts,” Andrus later wrote. “I even feared murder within the enclosure; for deadly enemies were already, in some case, being confined together. Mondorf, no one had to tell me, was a powder-keg.”

On August 12, Andrus accompanied several of his Nazi charges to the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, where he would spend the next year as commandant of the prison there. He requested two U.S. Army chaplains to fulfill the Geneva Convention mandate that prisoners of war be provided with spiritual guidance if they wanted it.

Those two chaplains – a Lutheran minister named Henry Gerecke, and a Catholic priest named Sixtus O’Connor – and their experiences with the major Nazi war criminals on trial there are at the heart of the book.

The two chaplains spent more time with the architects of the Holocaust – Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hans Frank…21 in all – than any other members of the U.S. military. They listened to their confessions, met with their families and eventually accompanied them to the gallows, all the while attempting to bring men who were considered monsters, back to the faith they knew as children.

Mission at Nuremberg examines the way in which religion combats evil and asks whether some men are beyond forgiveness and redemption.

Visit the Mission at Nuremberg website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel E. Sutherland's "Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake"

Daniel E. Sutherland is Distinguished Professor of History, University of Arkansas. The recipient of more than fifty awards, honors, and grants, he is best known for his acclaimed series of books chronicling nineteenth-century America.

Sutherland applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake, and reported the following:

Bizarre as it sounds, the Page 99 formula does seem to work more often than not, and it is so for my biography of James McNeill Whistler. Page 99 of Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake describes the artist upon his return to London in 1867, after an absence of over a year in South America. The city had changed, as would his relationship with his mistress-muse, an Irish girl named Joanna Hiffernan. During Whistler’s absence, she had gone to Paris to model for a pair of scandalous (that is, nude) paintings by the French artist Gustave Courbet, perhaps, as well, to share Courbet’s bed. Her relationship with Whistler crumbled soon thereafter.

Page 99 is suggestive, too, in that, coming nearly a third of the way through the narrative, it shows Whistler at one of several crossroads in his life. Victorian London was about to become the preeminent city in Europe, having run second best to Paris for several decades. It would also be the city most closely associated with Whistler and his art. It is where he would create his famous “nocturnes,” paint the iconic portrait of his mother, and be honored as a great Master. Indeed, it was during his year in South America that he first experimented with the techniques that would produce those moody nocturnes and tie him thereafter to the “art’s for art’s sake” movement. Whistler had left London because he was frustrated with his progress as a painter and his failure to win popular approval for his work. He returned rejuvenated, with new ideas, and ready to seize the acclaim that had largely eluded him.

Learn more about Whistler: A Life for Art's Sake at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Savage Conflict.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Côté Gillin's "Shrill Hurrahs"

Kate Côté Gillin holds a Ph.D. in American history from the College of William and Mary and works at the Hun School of Princeton. She was awarded the Caroline Ray Hovey 1967 Master Teachership and the Award for Teaching Excellence from the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia. She has also been honored with the Recognition for Teaching Excellence from the National Society of High School Scholars.

Gillin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Shrill Hurrahs: Women, Gender, and Racial Violence in South Carolina, 1865--1900, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Shrill Hurrahs details the origins of the Ellenton Riot of 1876 and puts a woman by the name of Mrs. Alonzo Harley at the center of it. Mrs. Harley claimed to have fended off a home invasion by black intruders. When a mob of white men captured one of the alleged assailants, a man named Peter Williams, they brought him before her. Mrs. Harley positively identified him, at which point he was beaten and shot by the white mob, although accounts differ as to whether or not he survived. When blacks retaliated for Williams' capture, the most violent racial conflict of Reconstruction era South Carolina began.

Overall, page 99 captures much of what the book argues about the power of women and their deliberate use of it to influence the racial and gendered landscape of the post-war South. Women, black and white, came into their own following emancipation, and both engaged actively in the often violent negotiations of the Reconstruction, Redemption, and early Jim Crow periods. Although their goals varied, their participation--direct and indirect--was consistent and crucial to determining southern power structures.

Learn more about Shrill Hurrahs at the University of South Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garrett Peck's "Capital Beer"

Garrett Peck is a literary journalist and independent historian.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his fifth and latest book, Capital Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in Washington, D.C., and reported the following:

From page 99:

Beer Gardens

The German immigrants brought not only their love of lager, but also the sense of drinking conviviality, Gemütlichkeit, which manifested in summer and winter beer gardens. The beer garden was a distinctly German import that Americans embraced, one that was noticeably different from male-only saloon. Entire families – fathers, mothers, children – would go together to the beer garden. It was normal for children to drink a little beer from their parents’ glass. American discovered how pleasant it was to sit outdoors with friends and sip suds fresh from the tap.

The beer garden wasn’t always garden-like, but it did have big communal tables for people to gather and often featured live music. Germans have never been given to boisterous drinking. The beer garden was a family place, a place for pleasant conversation, not a dive for drunken college students.”

This was the start of a section from my book Capital Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in Washington, D.C. that dealt with the beer garden culture that began in DC in the 1850s as an antidote to our sultry summers. A local history may seem esoteric and pertaining only to a particular market, but the fact is the drinking culture of Washington was largely repeated everywhere, especially once the Germans came to the United States and fundamentally altered our drinking habits - largely through lager beer. Before the Germans arrived, Americans drank whiskey and English-style ales, which are heavy and not the most pleasant to drink in summer. But lager? Oh lager. It’s an aged and mild and utterly quenchable beer. Imagine how tasty it seemed on the tongue in an era long before air conditioning. Lager was relief.

And to the broader point about what beer gardens meant for American society. They were refuges for families to gather together socially and to drink together. Although the Germans introduced beer gardens as an alternative to the saloon, Americans very quickly adopted the beer garden as their own: they are places of relaxation and wonder. Given that this was a familial social setting, the intention wasn’t to get drunk, but to use beer as a social lubricant. The temperance movement of course hated the beer gardens as much as they disliked the saloons. They eventually won with Prohibition, which drove drinking underground. Even though Prohibition ended in 1933 after its disastrous failure, I would argue that we’ve never fully gotten over it: alcohol still has some taboos, such as the question of underage drinking. Can you imagine today seeing a parent allowing their kid to take a sip of beer from their bottle? It happens all the time, but usually under the table, lest scornful eyes pass judgment.

American culture is a giant sponge. What the immigrant brings to our shores, we try on ourselves, and soon call it our own. You see this everyday in big and small ways, in our vocabulary (“I’m gonna pick up the kids from kindergarten, then take a siesta.”), to our drinking habits, to our food. How many times have you had pizza this month, or dropped in to your favorite Mexican restaurant, and washed it all down with a glass of beer or a margarita? We take the immigrant’s gift for granted.

Learn more about the book and author at Garrett Peck's website.

Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition.

Writers Read: Garrett Peck (January 2010).

The Page 99 Test: The Prohibition Hangover.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edmund Levin's "A Child of Christian Blood"

Edmund Levin is a Writers Guild and Emmy award–winning writer/producer for Good Morning America. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Slate, among other publications, and was included in The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology.

Levin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia – The Beilis Blood Libel, and reported the following:

A Child of Christian Blood is a history of the Mendel Beilis case, which could be called the Russian version of the Dreyfus Affair. Beilis, a Jewish brick factory clerk, was put on trial in Kiev in 1913 on a charge of killing a Christian boy to drain his blood to bake Passover matzo – the notorious blood libel. (Kiev, of course, was then part of the Russian Empire.) The thirty-four day trial, forgotten now, was a worldwide sensation that drew to Beilis’s defense such luminaries as Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The state had no evidence against Beilis, other than perjured and bribed testimony.

The dark diva of the Beilis affair - a twisted character straight out of a Dostoevsky novel - was a woman named Vera Cheberyak. The head of a criminal gang, Cheberyak was the most likely suspect in the boy’s murder. Astoundingly, she ended up as a star witness for the prosecution.

Page 99 is a rather strikingly good choice as it reveals the depths of Vera Cheberyak’s sociopathic depravity. Vera, briefly in jail, gets a new cellmate, a woman named Anna who has just murdered her husband. Vera immediately sees in Anna a potential mark and quickly figures out a way to take everything she has.

As people often do when confronted by misfortune too immense to comprehend, Anna fixated on trivialities. The police had taken some things of hers and she was worried about what would happen to them. Cheberyak said she would help. She was sure she would be released soon, and she would take care of Anna’s affairs. On a scrap of paper, Cheberyak had Anna draw up a document in her own hand. Anna, who must have been in a radical state of mental distress, thought she was giving Cheberyak permission only to take her things from the police station for safekeeping. In fact, in signing the paper, Anna transferred to Cheberyak the right to dispose of all her worldly goods, such as they were.

The Russian state – determined to convict an innocent Jew at all costs - would be willing to make common cause with this criminal sociopath.

Visit Edmund Levin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue