Meryl Gordon's "The Phantom of Fifth Avenue"

Meryl Gordon is the author of The Phantom of Fifth Avenue, as well as the author of Mrs Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of A Family Beyond Approach. She is an award-winning journalist and a regular contributor to Vanity Fair.

Gordon applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Phantom of Fifth Avenue and reported the following:

By the luck of the draw, Page 99 of The Phantom of Fifth Avenue marks the beginning of one of the most pivotal scenes in my book, leading up to the death of Huguette Clark's older sister Andree in 1918. Huguette was only 13 at the time and she was haunted by her sister's death for the remainder of her life. I was able to read Andree's and Huguette's diaries, plus family letters right before and after the death -- I teared up while reading these yellowing documents, it was so sad.

Visit Meryl Gordon's website.

See: Meryl Gordon's five best chronicles of high society.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael L. Satlow's "How the Bible Became Holy"

Michael L. Satlow is Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown University. He has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, How the Bible Became Holy, and reported the following:

When I set out to write this book, my goal was quite modest. I was going to take the consensus positions of the voluminous scholarship on the development of the authority of the texts that would end up in the Bible, synthesize them, and make them accessible to a non-scholarly audience. Although I knew most of this scholarship well, it was not until I sat down to write that I discovered two uncomfortable truths. First, many scholarly positions in this field do not really command a “consensus”; the evidence is sparse and cryptic and allows for many competing interpretations. Second, in many cases where there was at least an emerging consensus, I found myself increasingly disagreeing. Scholarly explanations often make sense in the narrow context in which they are often considered, but when placed into a larger historical narrative that I saw developing they often fell short. Disagreeing with my colleagues, especially in areas where they are more expert than I am, made me more than a little nervous. Given that I wanted to write an accessible narrative, I often also had to dispense with the tight and technical arguments to which scholars are accustomed.

Now take page 99. Here I discuss very briefly – too briefly – a topic that has and continues to vex biblical scholars: how was the Pentateuch produced? Who redacted a set of pre-existent sources into the Torah, and when and why did he, she, or they do it? I suggest that rather than understanding the Torah to be the work of the those Israelites who had been exiled to Babylonia after the destruction of the temple in 586 BCE (a common but far from unanimous position) we see it as a work that dates from the fourth century BCE, the work of scribes and priests in Jerusalem. The Torah, with its historical arc from creation to entrance into the land of Israel, should be seen together with the books of Chronicles, which contain a similar narrative arc and which we are relatively certain was produced in fourth-century BCE Jerusalem. Both emerged from the same milieu, and both attempted to create a history of Israel out of earlier sources that served the needs of a relatively young polity in Jerusalem.

To many scholars, those are fighting words.

Learn more about the book and author at Michael Satlow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mimi Sheller's "Aluminum Dreams"

Mimi Sheller is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. Through her research on Caribbean history, transnational and everyday mobilities, and mobile communication and locative media, she has helped to establish the new interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. She is the author of Democracy after Slavery (2000); Consuming the Caribbean (2003); and Citizenship from Below (2012), as well as several co-edited volumes in critical mobilities studies.

Sheller applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Aluminum Dreams is a striking 1943 advertising image from the Bohn Aluminum & Brass Corporation. The graphic illustration in rich hues pictures “A Possible Tractor of Tomorrow” and is part of a series of ads showing a railway observation car of the future (with a glass domed front), tomorrow’s power shovel, a future cotton picker (which looks like a giant futuristic vacuum cleaner), and a huge future tank truck for delivering milk. These images are a great way to show connections across the history of material culture and design, ideas of speed and modernity, and the political economy of global metals production and consumption.

The text on page 99 refers to futuristic designer Arthur Radebaugh who drew on the 1930s Streamline aesthetic of “formal compactness that lends static rigidity combined with a low weight and smooth, spherically shaped surfaces rendered in a bright, lightweight, metal.” Radebaugh applied this style to depicting life in the future with gleaming aluminum cities abuzz with personal helicopters, zeppelins, moving sidewalks, and elevated automated highways, and colonies on the moon. He is just one among a fun cast of maverick inventors, writers, architects and designers who appear in the book, including Jules Verne, R. Buckminster Fuller, Norman Bel Geddes, Jean Prouvé and Walter Gropius.

This image is crucial to the book’s argument that aluminum alloys contributed to the dream of high-speed travel and gravity-defying flight, which informed twentieth century mobile modernity and its visions of the future. Aluminum made the world modern both as a new material out of which to design streamlined modernism, and as a support for the entire infrastructure of fast transport and satellite communication that we associate with modernization. It appears in cars, trains, and planes; lightweight cans and aluminum-foiled foods; high power electricity lines and massive hydroelectric power projects for smelting; and aluminum powders that make their way into everything from cosmetics, food, paint and vaccines, to bombs, rocket fuel, and new nanotechnologies.

But aluminum also connects to darker dreams of modernization that came with heavy environmental costs in terms of mining bauxite in the Caribbean, West Africa, Australia and India, and using huge amounts of energy for smelting. Many harms and risks are embedded in this material culture, yet it is not easy to unravel aluminum from our everyday social practices.

Learn more about Aluminum Dreams at the MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kristie Macrakis's "Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies"

Kristie Macrakis, an author, historian and professor, was born and raised in Boston, MA. After completing her Ph.D in the history of science at Harvard University, she spent a post-doctoral year in newly unified Berlin, Germany. She is a professor in the school of history, technology and society at Georgia Tech in Atlanta where she teaches courses on history of science, Nazi Germany and the history of espionage.

Macrakis applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies: The Story of Invisible Ink from Herodotus to al-Qaeda, and reported the following:

Given the subject of my book – the history of invisible ink – I may well have opened up page 99 only to find a blank page! Instead, a facsimile of a developed invisible ink letter dating from the American Revolutionary War takes up about three quarters of the page. I can’t say this is typical of the whole book because it was understandably difficult to find invisible ink letters whether made visible or still invisible.

But the fact that a developed invisible ink letter dating from the American Revolutionary War exists, tells us quite a bit about the importance of this mode of secret communication in wartime. In particular, General George Washington was enamored with what he called “sympathetic stain.”

However, the letter reproduced here does not stem from the George Washington’s spies, but rather from the Tories. It is the first invisible ink letter that anyone has found since it dates from 6 May 1775. Benjamin Thompson, a turncoat – better known as the eminent physicist Count Rumford – wrote the letter to warn the British that the rebel army had grown to 30,000 men and that Congress intended to follow through with its plan of Independence at any cost.

This is an important bit of secret news and it needed to be sent in secret as if the patriots had discovered this message, Thompson would have been caught and hanged.

Aside from the content of the letter and the reason for using invisible ink to disguise it, another question to ask of it is, what kind of invisible ink formula did Thompson and George Washington use. The Revolutionary Ink chapter also uses detective skills to uncover the invisible ink formula used by both sides. The reader may be surprised to find out what the results were.

Learn more about Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies at the Yale University Press website and Kristie Macrakis's website.

The Page 99 Test: Seduced by Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelly A. Ryan's "Regulating Passion"

Kelly A. Ryan is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Southeast.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830, and reported the following:

Regulating Passion explores the relationship between sexuality and hierarchy during the colonial era through the early republic. Page 99 of the book takes the reader to the heart of the American Revolution, with Bostonians living under British occupation. White Bostonians chafed at the relationship British soldiers created with African Americans, whom white Bostonians believed should be loyal to them. To quell their own fears about the immorality of slavery and this new partnership, white Bostonians published sexualized indictments of the relationship between the British and African Americans that hinged on the beliefs that interracial sex was immoral and that African Americans were hypersexual.

Page 99 of Regulating Passion features a quote from “A Vaudevil,” a song published in 1776 that intended to reveal the betrayal of various groups during the occupation. “FanFan” an African American woman, says she enjoyed the blockade because of the opportunity to “get kiss’d by white man” and “eat good salt pork,” which was likely a nod to the price of her kiss. Citing sexual motivations, rather than political ones, was a means of discrediting the British/African American alliance that was truly fashioned out of economic and political imperatives. Whites continued to sexualize African Americans’ political activities after the war. At the end of page 99, we see white Americans claiming that a planned slave rebellion by African Americans in Montserrat intended to kill white men, “but the women would be spared for wives for the Negros.” Avoiding their own complicity in the horrors of slavery, white Americans fashioned narratives of sexual misconduct to alleviate their conscience and bolster their claims to superiority.

Page 99’s theme is indicative of larger trends in Regulating Passion, and I often reference these trends during my book talks. Sexual mores, crimes, and reputations are the major themes of the book. The criminalization and unsavory sexual reputations ascribed to white women, African Americans, Indians, and the poor, supported the patriarchal hierarchy. Individuals resisted these sexual characterizations and tried living according to their own standards, while others sought to shape more positive sexual reputations to earn a place in the public sphere. As individuals fought for inclusion, they often became agents of patriarchy by asserting they fit into the sexual mores created to empower wealthy white men. Ultimately, I hope the reader sees that sexuality was a powerful force in early America, and that it was a time as steeped in sexual intrigue as today.

Learn more about Regulating Passion at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Austin Sarat's "Gruesome Spectacles"

Austin Sarat is Associate Dean of the Faculty, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence & Political Science, and Director of Mellon Project on Student-Faculty Research at Amherst College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty readers will find part of the account of the botched execution of Allen Foster on May 2, 1953. Foster was executed in North Carolina’s gas chamber for robbing and raping the woman for whom he worked as a hired hand. In my book I try to tell the stories of those, like Allen Foster, whose executions went wrong and of the suffering they endured, but also about the suffering they inflicted on the victims of their grievous crimes. I do so in a way that treats a gruesome subject without sensationalism. Indeed, as one reviewer put it, “If ever a book took a measured approach to an incendiary subject, it is this one.”

My book offers the first comprehensive treatment of America’s botched executions and of their significance in law, popular culture, and in the struggle to end capital punishment. I studied every American execution from 1890-2010 and determined that just over 3% of them were botched. Among all of the technologies we have used to execute people—hanging, the firing squad, electrocution, the gas chamber, and lethal injection—the last is bungled the most, at 7%.

While botched executions have helped propel changes in the technologies used in capital punishment, they have played little role in the campaign to end the death penalty. This is so, in part, because they are seen as mere accidents with no broader significance. I hope that by offering a broad historical perspective that we can now more clearly consider whether there is something of broad significance about botched executions.

My book offers a chapter on each of the major technologies used in executions since 1890. In each I discuss the promises and aspirations associated with each new technology. I then examine the various ways that each technology goes wrong and tell the stories of the cases in which botched executions occur, focusing on the lives of the condemned, their crimes, and what happened to them when they were executed.

The book tells the story of America’s obsession with ideas of scientific progress, the way those ideas drove the search for efficient, reliable and humane methods of execution and how that search has come to naught in one technology after another.

I hope to help precipitate a conversation about whether 3% is an acceptable error rate in the practices of capital punishment.

Learn more about Gruesome Spectacles at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Turner's "Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities"

James Turner, a historian, is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities at the University of Notre Dame.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, and reported the following:

Today, almost everybody who goes to college takes courses in the humanities—English lit, art history, classics, history, etc. That wasn’t always true. The humanities didn’t exist in American or British universities until fairly late in the nineteenth century. But where did they come from? My curiosity about that question eventually took me to ancient Greece and from there on a long journey back to the twentieth century. The result of this adventure is Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Surprisingly, Philology is the first history of humanistic learning in the West as an integral whole. Parts of the story have been told (and often told well), but never stitched together. For me, research for the book was the most exciting voyage of a lifetime in scholarship, as I learned all sorts of curious stuff I’d never before dreamed about. Who knew that military engineers played an indispensable part in creating modern archaeology? I hope readers share my excitement.

Page 99 is actually pretty typical, in that it crosses continents and decades in two or three paragraphs. The topic happens to be the beginnings of modern linguistics, and the page jumps from British colonial officials studying Sanskrit in India to early investigators of Native American tongues. On another random page (301), readers will discover how excavation of primitive flint tools alongside bones of extinct animals in a cave in Devonshire paradoxically helped to birth the modern discipline of history. Opening yet another (83), we find an Anglican clergyman compiling a path-breaking work of Old English scholarship while on the lam to escape execution for treason.

Who might be interested in reading Philology? Well, anyone interested in how modern knowledge and modern liberal education came to take the shape they did. Likewise, anyone who follows current arguments over the relevance of the humanities and their possible futures. Understanding where the humanities came from, after all, is essential to informed debate about where they might and should go.

Learn more about Philology at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Reimer's "Count Like an Egyptian"

David Reimer is associate professor of mathematics at The College of New Jersey.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Count Like an Egyptian: A Hands-on Introduction to Ancient Mathematics, and reported the following:

Context is important, especially in mathematics. Our brains are overwhelmed each day with an excessive amount of data. Without motivation, abstract mathematics will be tossed out in our nightly purge with the rest of our useless short term memory. Context also helps us understand difficult concepts by giving us a model to supply meaning to abstract mathematical relations. Once we have a working paradigm, we can tie together disparate notions into the big ideas that define a subject. Count Like an Egyptian is a book on ancient Egyptian mathematics and page 99 is the beginning of a section that illustrates the importance of context.

The section starts by describing the annual flood of the Nile. It then explains how Egyptians knew it was coming, how high it would be and how they would trap the life bringing waters and fertile soil it carried. As the flood waters receded, ancient Egyptians confronted a new problem. The old boundaries that marked one farmer’s field from another were washed away. Even worse, the river may have changed its course making it impossible to reestablish the old borders. The best they could do was to give a farmer a new field of the same area.

Now that the importance of area has been established, the book describes various field area problems modeled after actual 3,600 year old word problems. It starts with rectangular fields. Since rivers rarely agree to cut fields at nice right angles, it then explains how Egyptians calculated the area of other shapes. As always the book then presents the reader with problems so they can directly experience ancient methods.

The section ends with the solution to one last problem. The answer is surprisingly short and elegant. It’s here one of the main themes of book is reexamined. Modern mathematics is dominated by equations and algorithms. If you follow the prescribed steps mindlessly you will obtain a correct answer. Ancient Egyptian mathematics favors creativity and wit. It provides a set of tools to be used on a whim. In the hands of the skilled, Egyptian math can reduce long computations to a handful of steps. Each Egyptian problem is a puzzle and its solution is an art.

Learn more about Count Like an Egyptian at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Murray Carpenter's "Caffeinated"

Murray Carpenter has reported caffeine-related stories for the New York Times, Wired, National Geographic, NPR, and PRI’s The World. He has also written for the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor and other media outlets. He holds a degree in psychology from the University of Colorado and an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, and has worked as a medical lab assistant in Ohio, a cowboy in Colombia, a farmhand in Virginia, and an oil-exploring “juggie” in Wyoming.

Carpenter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us, and reported the following:

This book grew from my belief that caffeine does not get the respect it deserves, and the drug’s role in shaping our behavior, affecting our moods, and boosting commerce are underappreciated. Most Americans take caffeine daily, and we consume most of that caffeine in coffee, in which it is a natural constituent. But over the last 60 years, we have increasingly been getting our caffeine fix from soft drinks and, more recently, energy drinks. Page 99 is where I was unraveling a vexing mystery.

Researching the book, I became intrigued with the industry that supplies the pure, powdered form of the drug. We import 15 million pounds of powdered caffeine annually, most of which is blended into soft drinks. Some of that is extracted from plant products, such as coffee or tea. But these processes account for less than half of the powdered caffeine we consume. Where does the rest of that caffeine come from?

It turns out that page 99 covers two of my unexpected findings: most of the powdered caffeine we use in the United States is not extracted from natural plant products, such as coffee or tea, but chemically synthesized in pharmaceutical plants; and Monsanto was one of the first large-scale caffeine producers in the United States.

From page 99:

“Tea wastes are the largest single source in domestic solvent extraction processes, and far more important than coffee which provides the chemical through decaffeination,” Chemical and Engineering News reported [in 1945]. “A practical process for the production of caffeine by complete synthesis would probably displace foreign sources for theobromine and caffeine in this country. . . . Wholly synthesized caffeine,” the journal reported, cost twice as much as extracted caffeine, which then sold for less than three dollars per pound.

Later that year, the same journal reported that an American firm was taking up the challenge, by diversifying from its tradition of producing natural caffeine: “Monsanto Chemical Co. has disclosed its intention to free the United States from dependency on foreign-produced natural sources of caffeine through construction and operation of what will be the world’s first large-scale plant for the manufacture of synthetic caffeine.”

Caffeine synthesis, assembling the chemical from its building blocks instead of carving it away from plant material, was a German innovation. The chemist Emil Fischer pioneered the process in 1895, using uric acid as the primary building block. (This was one of the achievements that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1902.)

And it turned out that Germans had also pioneered the industrial production of synthetic caffeine, a few years ahead of Monsanto. The German company Boehringer Ingelheim had built a large synthetic caffeine plant in 1942, though Americans may not have been aware of it. Then, as now, all of the major caffeine-consuming nations in Europe and North America lacked any commercially viable caffeinated crop. Chocolate, coffee, and tea are imported from less developed countries, to sate our appetites for legal stimulants. It can be challenging to keep the supply lines open, even in peacetime, but the war years were especially fraught, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ford Madox Ford’s test works well for this book. The distinctions between the caffeine that naturally occurs in coffee and tea and the powdered caffeine that is blended into beverages are primary themes throughout the book. And the historical tensions between the two forms of caffeine linger today. The Food and Drug Administration is now investigating the safety of energy drinks and other products with added caffeine. Most of that caffeine is now synthesized in pharmaceutical plants, but Monsanto is no longer producing caffeine.

Visit Murray Carpenter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David N. Livingstone's "Dealing with Darwin"

David N. Livingstone is a professor of geography and intellectual history at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is author of Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins.

Livingstone applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Dealing with Darwin parachutes the reader into nineteenth-century Toronto, and in particular into the mind of the Scotsman Daniel Wilson, Professor of History and English Literature and later President of the University there. He’s grappling with the hottest question of the day – Darwin’s theory of evolution, and he casts it into the context of the debate over whether the human race is of single or multiple origin. Because he came from a strongly anti-slavery evangelical family and had long held to the monogenetic account of human origins, he was suspicious of any theory that might compromise the fixity of the human species. But Wilson’s response to Darwin’s challenge was cool and calm, as it was elsewhere in Canada. In fact it turns out that most Canadian scientists more or less ignored the theory, while the theologians at Knox College in Toronto engaged with it in creative and stimulating ways.

This circumstance might provoke in a reader the question: how was Darwin’s theory received elsewhere? How did other religious communities ‘deal with Darwin’? And that’s what the book is about. It seeks to tell the story of how religious communities sharing a strongly Scots Presbyterian heritage engaged with Darwinian evolution in a range of different settings – Toronto, Edinburgh, Princeton, Belfast, Columbia. All were major intellectual centers of Scottish Calvinism. All shared the same theological heritage. All were committed to the same confessional standards. Now, given the serious architectural similarity of their respective theological mind-sets, it might seem that they all responded in the same way to Darwin’s challenge. Right? Actually …. no. In Edinburgh, Darwinian evolution was embraced; in Belfast it was repudiated; in Princeton tolerated; in Columbia excoriated. Why? Because in each and every case the debate over Darwin was rooted in local cultural politics. How Presbyterians in these different locations dealt with Darwin was shaped in profound ways by such matters as who had the right to control higher education; long-standing convictions about race relations and the politics of ethnic segregation; the challenge of radical biblical criticism and subversive anthropology; and the influence of local scientists who were national leaders in their field. By telling the stories of these encounters, Dealing with Darwin challenges the assumption that it’s possible to speak of the relationship between science and religion.

Learn more about Dealing with Darwin at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue