Craig Packer's "Lions in the Balance"

Craig Packer is professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior and director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota. He lives in Minneapolis, MN.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Lions in the Balance: Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Lions in the Balance provides a cultural and historical vignette of Tanzania’s traditional capital, Dar es Salaam – the Dwelling of Peace. Dar is located on the shores of the Indian Ocean and has been a cultural melting pot for centuries. This precise scene takes place during an important day in the Muslim calendar, when black-robed Shiites commemorate the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandson. But the date coincides with a Hindu festival, and Dar’s Indian population is dressed in Nehru suits and brightly colored saris.

More important than the scene’s exoticism is the history that brought these two religions to Africa in the first place. The Arabs transported slaves and ivory to Zanzibar from the mainland for a thousand years; the British brought clerks and shopkeepers from India during the Colonial Era. Despite the abolition of slavery and the country’s independence in the 1960’s, the Arabs and Indians have maintained their economic advantages ever since.

Lions in the Balance covers an eight-year period when I tried to reform the sport hunting industry in Tanzania while maintaining a long-term research project in the Serengeti and attempted to establish a large-scale program to measure the effectiveness of foreign-aid projects within this desperately impoverished country. By this point in the book, I have come to realize how corruption in the hunting industry has undermined the future of most wildlife areas in Tanzania. I have battled the cynicism of the government agencies that are meant to regulate hunting practices, and I have also identified most of the major players who have been enriching themselves at the expense of the country’s lions, leopards and elephants. But whereas I had uncovered a paper trail documenting the business partnerships of most of the European and North American hunting operators, I hadn’t penetrated the tight-knit – and largely mysterious – ethnic communities of businessmen from Arabia, India and Pakistan.

Dar es Salaam is also where my co-investigators and I experience some of our most dangerous physical encounters with quicksand, armed robbers, government officials and wealthy business tycoons. Dar was the launching pad for our scientific studies of man-eating lions and the site of our negotiations with international aid agencies. The climax of the book occurs in Dar es Salaam on page 338, by which time the scene on page 99 will have prepared the reader to expect the unexpected.

Learn more about Lions in the Balance at the University of Chicago website.

My Book, The Movie: Lions in the Balance.

Writers Read: Craig Packer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keith Heyer Meldahl's "Surf, Sand, and Stone"

Keith Heyer Meldahl is Professor of Geology and Oceanography at Mira Costa College and the author of Hard Road West and Rough-Hewn Land.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Surf, Sand, and Stone: How Waves, Earthquakes, and Other Forces Shape the Southern California Coast, and reported the following:

Page 99 is filled entirely by a diagram and thus does not give a good sense of the book as a whole. A browser would do better to turn to the "Afterword" where I ponder the lessons of the geologic past and what they tell us about the present and future of the Southern California coast.

Walk on a Southern California beach, and a sense of permanence may come to mind. The sand scrunches predictably underfoot, the coastal bluffs loom seemingly unchanged, and the sea brushes the shore with its same ageless rhythm. Yet the scene can quickly change. Waves from a single storm may erase that beach. Portions of the bluff may collapse without warning. A large earthquake might elevate the coast several feet in an instant. And if we flip back through just the last few million years, the coastal scene, far from appearing stable, looks like frenetic animation. The sea bobs up and down, earthquakes crackle without letup, tsunamis wash ashore, and islands lurch up from the sea.

Does it matter to know these things? I think yes. Probing Southern California’s geologic past can inform decisions we make today. The past tells us that earthquakes and tsunamis will strike the coast again, and although we cannot predict when or where, we can prepare. It also tells us that Southern California’s beaches are in constant flux, with sand arriving and leaving in vast quantities every year. But river dams and seawalls have choked off sand arrivals to the beaches, so now more sand leaves than arrives. Shrunken beaches give coastal bluffs less protection from wave attack. Today, miles of rock and concrete armor much of Southern California’s coast, but these only postpone the sea’s advance. And what of the sea itself? Here too, the past is clear. In recent geologic time, the sea has risen and fallen hundreds of feet as polar ice sheets have come and gone. By happenstance, much of human history has unfolded during a time of unusually stable sea level. That is changing. We presently face a probable sea rise of two to six feet over the next century.

These developments—shrinking beaches and rising seas—point to a looming coastal erosion crisis for Southern California. How will we handle it? Perhaps through a combination of managed retreat and beach replenishment (importing sand to depleted beaches). But the scale of such replenishment will necessarily be enormous. We will need to import enough sand onto our beaches to make up for ongoing losses from dams and seawalls and to keep up with the rising sea. I’m reminded of Alice in Wonderland, where the Red Queen explains to Alice, “You see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”

Learn more about Surf, Sand, and Stone at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc Van De Mieroop's "Philosophy before the Greeks"

Marc Van De Mieroop is professor of history at Columbia University. His books include The Ancient Mesopotamian City, King Hammurabi of Babylon, A History of the Ancient Near East, The Eastern Mediterranean in the Age of Ramesses II, and A History of Ancient Egypt.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia, and reported the following:

Page 99 is part of the two chapters in the book that treat the science of divination in ancient Babylonia, ironically the discipline in that culture that illustrates most clearly what rules its intellectuals applied in order to determine what could and could not be true. What most of us today consider unknowable, that is, the future, the Babylonians investigated most rigorously, and the texts in which they did so vastly outnumbered their other scholarly writings. They believed that the gods communicated messages about what was about to happen in every aspect of the world that surrounded them: the movements of stars and planets in heaven, the behavior of animals on earth, the shape and condition of the liver of sacrificial lambs, and much more. From their earliest history onward they searched for these signs through observation, as people in many other cultures did. But in the 18th century BCE, and uniquely among ancient cultures, they started to explore the possibilities of interpretation much further through writing – they generated omens using the boilerplate structure, if X is observed, Y will happen, and created massive lists investigating various signs. These did not stick to the possible, however, but taking advantage of the list format, played around with every element in a statement. For example, if a certain mark observed on the right side of a planet was auspicious, it was inauspicious when observed on the left side – through the list format it was easy to develop the options further by considering other locations, different colors, the time of observation, the identity of the planet, and further variants. While impossible in reality, they were perfectly logical in the written context.

Page 99 in my book deals with the moment when these lists were first composed and points out that the scholars who developed them used the same format and language as their colleagues who had started to write down laws centuries earlier.

“If the apex of the heart is bright on the right—elation, my army will reach its destination” has the same structure as the law “If a man rents an ox for threshing, 20 liters of grain is its hire.”

Elsewhere, this allows me to argue that the formulation of laws, like the famous ones of Hammurabi, was bound by the same rules of elaboration, and I show how the scholarly manipulation of the written word is the starting point of Babylonian philosophy.

Learn more about Philosophy before the Greeks at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert DuPlessis's "The Material Atlantic"

Robert S. DuPlessis is Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and International Relations Emeritus at the Department of History, Swarthmore College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800, and reported the following:

Opening to page 99 will give a sense of The Material Atlantic’s multivalent project: close attention to sources and historiography as well as exposition and explanation concerning critical articles—clothes and textiles—that at once satisfy a basic human need and enable personal expression and group identification. Focusing on apparel fabrics and fashions, The Material Atlantic explores the material selves that individuals of diverse ethnicities, statuses, and occupations created in a variety of environments around the vast Atlantic basin. In order to uncover both everyday and exceptional sartorial experiences of women and men, indigenous and immigrant, enslaved and free, poor and affluent, the book uses a wide array of written and pictorial sources, and has a lot of illustrations in color and greyscale. In addition, it addresses central issues in recent scholarship on the Atlantic world, globalization, and consumption.

Found in Chapter 2, “Acquiring imported textiles and dress,” the text on page 99 is part of the analysis of merchant textile stocks, the most important source of clothing fabrics around the Atlantic. The chapter also outlines the plethora of market and non-market modes of fabric acquisition that allowed people in the Atlantic world to invent what I term “dress regimes,” the individually and socially created complexes of garments and related items, the practices by which they were appropriated and deployed, and verbal and pictorial discourses that sought to direct, explain, and justify (or invalidate) both apparel and dressing practices.

The next four chapters investigate the processes and meanings of dress regime creation among indigenous, enslaved, and free settler men and women in a dozen locations on both sides of the Atlantic; the final chapter compares these fashions both with dress regimes found on the “eve” of the Atlantic world (just as exchanges and migrations began to intensify from the early seventeenth century, as delineated in Chapter 1), and with those found in late eighteenth century Europe, and concludes by outlining the effects of Atlantic consumption on European textile manufacturing.

Learn more about The Material Atlantic at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jamie Blaine's "Midnight Jesus"

Jamie Blaine is a licensed psychotherapist and crisis interventionist who has worked in mental hospitals, megachurches, rehabs, radio stations, and roller rinks. His writing has been featured in such outlets as Salon, OnFaith, Bass Guitar, Drummer UK, The Weeklings, The Nervous Breakdown, and Ultimate Classic Rock.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Midnight Jesus: Where Struggle, Faith, and Grace Collide..., and reported the following:

This is my personal test: I pick up a book and turn to a random page, reading wherever my eyes happen to fall. Does it hold my attention? If so, I turn to another random page and repeat. If a book makes it through three random glances, I’m in. You got me. The gist is this: If you truly love a band? You love their B-sides, their outtakes and demos. You love the worst song on the record still. If I like your style and voice as a writer – I’ll like it on any and every page.

Here’s page 99 from a few of my favorites.

Rami Shapiro’s Way of Solomon says, “I do not want a true me to live forever, I want to live forever.” As philosophical time traveler Ted “Theodore” Logan might say, Whoa.

From Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs: “Watching modern day pro basketball is like watching my roommate in college play Nintendo.”

Don Miller’s Through Painted Deserts tells a great story about being starving but too thirsty for peanut butter at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Neil Strauss’ hard-hitting book on relationships titled, The Truth reminds me: “fantasizing is a defense against intimacy.”

And my book, Midnight Jesus? I have no clue what lies on page 99 but I’m hoping for the best as I flip to that spot, like a Vegas craps addict waiting for the dice to lie still.

Here’s what we get.

David flinches, looking towards the slap as Softball storms in from the other door, flattening him with a thin mattress while I step on his right wrist. He tries to pull away but I lean my weight against his arm until he drops the knife.

Softball pitches the mattress and knife to the side, straddling David, her knees on his shoulders, her hard face close and tight. “You really think we’re gonna let you stab yourself?” she growls. “This is the mattress trick.”

David looks past her to me, hurt and confusion over his face. “You lied?” he asks in a pitiful tone.

“Of course I lied.” I pick up the blade and turn it in the light. “Wouldn’t you?”

Is this my finest moment? No. Is it accurate for the book? Indicitive of the whole? A glimpse into this memoir of misfits and psych ward conflicts? I’d say yes, I think I pass the test.

Visit the Midnight Jesus website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gil Troy's "The Age of Clinton"

Gil Troy has been a professor at McGill University since 1990. Maclean’s Magazine has repeatedly identified him as one of McGill’s “Popular Profs” and History News Network designated him one of its first “Top Young Historians.” His many books include Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight Against Zionism as Racism.

Troy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, and reported the following:

From page 99:

If Abraham Lincoln was “the godfather of the Pacific railroad,” and Dwight Eisenhower the father of the Interstate Highway System, Bill Clinton is the stepfather of the Internet, with the boundless, wireless network fulfilling his mission to modernize America by uniting it virtually. Even if neither Al Gore nor Bill Clinton invented the Internet—scientists did—Gore was its Henry Clay, persistently pushing prophetic legislation that facilitated its growth, just as Clay pushed internal improvements. A tolerant political culture would have forgiven Gore’s awkward attempts at self-promotion and prized his visionary contributions.

With profound insight into America’s future, proud of what he had accomplished in just one year, Clinton resented the media carping and partisan doubts. November’s Congressional Quarterly had deemed his first year the most productive presidential rookie year legislatively since Dwight Eisenhower.

The first line on page 99 of The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s reads: “Bill Clinton and Al Gore wanted government to perfect and protect the ‘data superhighway.’” That one sentence captures two of the book’s central challenges, trying to assess Bill Clinton’s presidency and tracking The Great American Hook-Up, when computers were inked to the internet – one of the most significant changes that occurred in the 1990s.

Page 99 captures Clinton and his Vice President at their best, thinking ahead, anticipating big changes, building that proverbial bridge to the twenty-first century. Clinton and Gore envisioned “a nationwide, invisible, seamless, dynamic web of transmission mechanisms, information, appliances, content, and people.” And thanks to the technological infrastructure, millions of Americans were able, within that amazing decade, to get “on line,” making their already marvelous computers, all the more powerful, going from Everything Machines to Anything, Anywhere machines.

Remember, in 1990, Amazon was just a big river, Google, was just a really big number, and “Pay Pal” was something loan sharks said. In so many ways, our current lives were being invented, or at least radically reset during that decade – and during that presidency.

The link between this dramatic transformation and the Clinton presidency justifies the book’s approach, which is to look at the Clinton presidency in the context of the 1990s. With each chapter telling the story of a given year in the decade, from 1990 through 2000, we get a broader appreciation of what the Clinton administration did – and did not – do, and a better sense of how the great inventions and prosperity boosted Clinton while the dramatic changes also stirred anxieties and undermined him.

Toward the bottom of the page, assessing 1993, Bill Clinton’s Roller Coaster first year, I write: “With profound insight into America’s future, proud of what he had accomplished in just one year, Clinton resented the media carping and partisan doubts.” This sentence reflects on what I call the Clinton Conundrum – how did a president who was so talented, and accomplished so much, leave America so badly divided and feeling so badly? That requires a greater appreciation of Bill Clinton’s talents, shortcomings, and challenges – in some ways, by anticipating the changes he tackled, he also helped unnerve many citizens by representing those changes.

Learn more about the book and author at Gil Troy's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: Moynihan's Moment.

My Book, The Movie: Moynihan's Moment.

My Book, The Movie: The Age of Clinton.

--Marshal Zeringue

Russell B. Goodman's "American Philosophy Before Pragmatism"

Russell Goodman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his book, American Philosophy Before Pragmatism, and reported the following:

My book tells a story of the development of philosophy in America from the mid 18th century to the late 19th century. The key figures in this story, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, were not professors but men of the world, whose thinking blended with religion, politics, and literature. I consider them in relation to the philosophers and other thinkers they found important: the deism of John Toland and Matthew Tindal, John Locke’s political and religious philosophy, the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, and the Romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The book concludes with an Epilogue on some continuities in American philosophy, especially between Emerson and the pragmatists.

Page 99 does not mention any of these thinkers, however, so in that regard it is not a good guide to the book’s subject matter. But it does concern a main theme of the book, discussed by all the writers on whom I focus: American slavery. The page opens a section entitled “Slavery in the American Republic” that begins with my statement that “there is considerable irony in the fact that people so concerned with freedom should have constructed a republic that acknowledged slavery--without, however, ever using the words ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ in the Constitution.” As examples I mention the Constitution’s fugitive slave law, which referred to “Persons … held to Service or Labour in one State … escaping into another,” and its legalization of the “importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,” at least until 1808. A third example, defended by James Madison in the Federalist, states that the population of each state is to be “determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

In his 1844 address commemorating the abolition of the slave trade in the British West Indies, Emerson wrote that “[l]anguage must be raked; the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been." We do not need to rake language very deeply to consider who the non-free and non-Indian persons mentioned in the Constitution were, and or to learn what the polite word "servant" meant in a society in which slavery was legal. Three of my main subjects—Edwards, Franklin, and Jefferson, were slaveowners, but all five played a role in disturbing the uneasy American equilibrium that included slavery.

Learn more about American Philosophy Before Pragmatism at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell's "Picture Titles"

Ruth Bernard Yeazell is the Chace Family Professor of English and director of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. Her books include Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Picture Titles includes a picture as well as text and thus demonstrates a central theme of the book: the way in which visual images in Western culture are mediated by language. The picture comes from a famous painting attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and shows two legs sticking out of the water. Those legs are a tiny detail of the canvas as whole, which is titled on its frame (in French) Landscape with the Fall of Icarus; but guided by that title, both ordinary viewers and scholars alike have taken them as the focus of the painting. Without the title, the legs could just as easily belong to a swimmer or diver as to the mythical boy who plunged into the sea when he flew too near the sun; with the title, they become not only the legs of Icarus but the emotional center of the painting—a painting that has inspired more poems over the past century than any other. In the best known of these, W. H. Auden‘s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the discrepancy between the rest of the canvas and those “white legs disappearing into the green / Water” prompts a meditation on the human capacity to ignore the suffering of others.

But while almost everyone who approaches the painting reads it through its title, that title did not, in fact, originate with the painter. Like many of the pictures included in my book, the work we know as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus acquired its name from those I call “middlemen”—in this case, from the twentieth-century scholars and curators who sought to identify the work after it surfaced at a London sale in 1912. Rather than an authoritative guide to the artist’s intention, such a title is an act of interpretation after-the-fact.

Picture Titles begins by exploring how this practice of titling paintings arose out of earlier modes of identifying and describing them. Page 99 appears in the section of the book devoted to the ways in which such titles have in turn shaped viewers’ experience—sometimes with far-reaching cultural effects. I conclude with case studies of painters, from Jacques-Louis David to Jasper Johns, who have sought to control such interpretation by aggressively engaging in the business of titling.

Learn more about Picture Titles at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lowell Edmunds's "Stealing Helen"

Lowell Edmunds is professor emeritus of classics at Rutgers University. He is the author of Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues and the editor of Approaches to Greek Myth.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective, and reported the following:

On page 99 I am just short of the end of my chapter 2, on Helen’s twin brothers, Castor and Polydeuces. The structure of this chapter mirrors the structure of my book as a whole, and so Ford Madox Ford was right.

In chapter 1, I have established, mainly on the basis of folktales (printed in an appendix), an international story that I call the “The Abduction of the Beautiful Wife.” With reference to this story, I criticize various claims (I call them hypostatizing) made about Helen. In chapter 2 it’s Helen the Indo-European dawn goddess whom I call into question.

In chapter 3, I return to my positive thesis and show how the Greek myth of Helen’s abduction by the Trojan Paris (also called Alexander) conforms to the pattern of “Abduction,” right down to the stratagem that the husband always needs in order to recover his wife. In the ancient Greek version, it’s the Trojan Horse. Then in chapter 4 I criticize two other hypostases of Helen. One is the Helen of cult. She is regularly called a “goddess.” I cast doubt on this idea. The other Helen, a creature of literary criticism, has a self and a personality and is tantamount to a character in modern fiction.

As against the “real” Helens of these hypostases, in my concluding chapter 5 I reaffirm—back to the positive—the Helen of narrative, who was appropriated again and again in ancient Greece, not only in poetry of various kinds but also in local legends, as in some examples from the island of Rhodes. Rhodians wanted to attach to themselves some part of her fame. These are new Helens, and each one is for the locals the real Helen. But the most interesting of these Helens, about which I wish that we knew more, might be the Helen of the Pythagoreans of Croton (southern Italy). She came from the moon and returned there when her mortal life was over. This Helen reappears in the propaganda of Simon Magus. From him, I trace a line that leads on to Goethe’s Faust.

Learn more about Stealing Helen at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gavin Weightman's "Eureka: How Invention Happens"

Gavin Weightman is a journalist, historian, and former documentary filmmaker. He has published more than twenty books, including The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story and Children of the Light: How Electricity Changed Britain Forever.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Eureka: How Invention Happens, and reported the following:

Page 99:

...obsolete their creators are liable to be dismissed as misguided or backward. But it is their pioneer work that generates optimism and draws out the backing for the more advanced technologies which replace them.

However, when Farnsworth began his labours, the industry view was still that some version of mechanical scanning of images was the most promising way forward for the transmitter. It was not that people were unable to see that a cathode ray tube camera would be superior. That was not in question. Very little work was being done on it because the problem of discovering how to manipulate electrons in a vacuum tube involved experimentation with a much less accessible technology than the Nipkow disk or any of the other mechanical scanners. With the mechanical scanners you could pretty much see what was going on with the naked eye. How electrons were behaving in a sealed glass tube was not apparent and involved a highly sophisticated understanding of physics.

The key discovery that electrically charged particles a thousand times smaller than atoms would travel through a vacuum had been made in the nineteenth century. It had been shown, too, that when these particles, or electrons as they became known, hit a photoelectric surface they could produce an image. Farnsworth’s all-electric television system would have to manipulate this laboratory equipment in some way so that the cathode ray tube performed the same function as the Nipkow disk and the selenium cell. He was not the first to attempt this but he had a chance to be the first to make it work. The biggest problem was with the camera.

As Everson had anticipated, California provided Farnsworth with some much-needed expertise as well as with financial backing. Bill Cummings, in charge of glass blowing for the University of California in Berkeley, who had made them their first tubes, taught Cliff Gardner the art. In time he became very skilful. Meanwhile, Everson and Pem worked with Farnsworth making magnetic coils and experimenting with the photosensitive materials. At the outset, Farnsworth was wildly optimistic about what he could achieve in a short space of time. In 1927…

Page 99 of Eureka: How Invention Happens lands the reader somewhere in the middle of a chapter I called “Seeing with electricity”. Looking at it a good while after I wrote it I would say it reads well enough, though it is not especially evocative or enticing. No publisher would chose it as an extract for publicity: there are other pages in this account of the invention of television which are much more fun. The page 99 test originally was a way of judging fiction. My book is non-fiction and is bound therefore to contain a good few pages of prose which I hope are readable and interesting but which are not going to dazzle the reader. How much the text on page 99 would give a sense of the central theme of the book I am not sure: it is there alright but, out of context, I suspect it is not really evident.

Eureka is an account of what I have called the “ancient history” of five twentieth century inventions: the aeroplane, television, the bar code, the personal computer and the mobile phone. Each of these inventions was made possible by a long accumulation of scientific understanding, technological advance and inventive genius stretching back at least as far as the eighteenth century. One invention would lead to another and technologies would merge. Scientific understanding was always crucial but the breakthrough–what I have called the “eureka moment” when an invention works for the first time, however crudely–has often been achieved by an amateur or outsider. This is not so surprising when you consider that only one of the inventions in my book, the bar code, could be said to have been a “necessity”. Established industries had no need for television, the mobile phone, the aeroplane or the personal computer.

Some of the flavor of the book is there on Page 99 as a rank outsider, the American Philo Farnsworth, struggles with the near impossible task of creating an electronic television system in the 1920s. He nearly made it but the effort broke him...now read on!

Visit Gavin Weightman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue