Tembi Locke's "From Scratch"

Tembi Locke is an accomplished actor who has appeared in over forty television shows and films, including The Magicians, NCIS: LA, Animal Kingdom and Dumb and Dumber To. She is also a TEDx speaker. Her talk, What Forty Steps Taught Me About Love and Grief, traces her journey as a cancer caregiver. She is the creative voice behind The Kitchen Widow, a web series and grief support community that has received mentions in the New York Times and the Guardian. The author of From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, she lives in Los Angeles with her young daughter but can be found each summer on the island of Sicily.

Locke applied the “Page 99 Test” to From Scratch and reported the following:

Set largely on the mythical island of Sicily, From Scratch is a story of cross-cultural love, heart-wrenching loss, family, forgiveness, motherhood, and the table as a place to grow and renew. The memoir follows the first three summers I traveled with my young daughter to the rural village in Sicily that was my late chef-husband’s hometown. The idea was to spend time with my mother-in-law, who was also a widow and a woman with whom I had had a fractured beginning, and see if we could forge a new relationship in the wake of loss. And, I wanted my daughter not to lose more family than she already had. The emotional stakes were high, the geography challenging. However, over the course of each of those summers something unexpected emerged.

Page 99 falls at the beginning of the first summer in a chapter entitled, “Island of Stone.” There is a paragraph in the middle of the page that gets to one of the major questions of the book and the emotional underpinning driving the narrative.

The scene is simple. My seven-year-old daughter and I are on a plane about to land in Sicily for the first time without my husband. In fact, I am carrying his ashes onboard. The plan is to deplane then drive along the Mediterranean coastline for an hour before ascending into the foothills of the Madonie Mountains. I am severely jetlagged, bereft with grief, and my daughter is asleep on my lap carrying a grief more unpredictable than mine. I briefly consider deplaning, gathering our bags and heading back to my life in Los Angeles. Only that life is equally raw and feels structurally unsafe. So, I get off the plane and walk my daughter into the Sicilian sun. Somewhere inside, I am hoping the island and a town of family and near-family will help ease my way, make my daughter smile, or, at least, buy me a few weeks of repose.

The final sentence of paragraph speaks to the central idea that love can sometimes ask more of us than we know we are capable of. I’d say the paragraph “reveals the quality of the whole.” In part. You’ll have to read the book to learn more.

Visit Tembi Locke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Cole's "Dockworker Power"

Peter Cole is Professor of History at Western Illinois University and a Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area is his second book. Previously, he wrote Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia, co-edited Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, and edited Ben Fletcher: The Life & Times of a Black Wobbly.

Cole applied the “Page 99 Test” to Dockworker Power and reported the following:

In 1969 O. P. F. Harwood, an economist at the (white only) University of Natal-Durban, in South Africa boasted, “Labour at the Port of Durban is not a problem, as it is, for example, at the ports of the United Kingdom, where it is regarded as their most serious problem.” Though he can be forgiven for failing to predict the future, Harwood continued, “In Durban harbour this problem hardly exists.” Instead, that very year, Durban dockers struck—the first signs that the black working class in South Africa was reawakening. They threatened to do so in 1971 and struck again in late 1972. While these workers, in fact, reignited a quiescent labor movement few know of their pivotal role. Instead, students of South African history are taught that, in January 1973, black workers at Coronation Brick downed tools and “officially” launched the so-called “Durban Strikes of 1973” the largest strike wave of black workers since 1946. It was just a few years after that last strike that the National Party, victorious in 1948 election, instituted the world’s most notorious system of white supremacy in the post-World War II world, apartheid (literally “apartness” in Afrikaans). The legendary Durban Strikes involved upwards of 100,000 workers from more than 150 companies, shocked the nation, and, restarted the national anti-apartheid movement that largely had been quiescent since its brutal repression a decade earlier. In the words of the editors of the South African Democracy Education Trust, creators of the most authoritative history of the struggle, “The revival of the workers’ movement in the factories, mines and stores was arguably the most important development of the 1970s.” This upsurge of black worker activism stunned most South Africans since the decade prior had been “quiet.” Left out of most histories is that, under the surface just prior to the Durban Strikes, local dockers were rising. While, no doubt, the Durban Strikes shattered the deafening silence following early 1960s repression, in fact, dockworker activism preceded and helped inspire the Durban Strikes.

Page 99 of my book explores the significance of the October 1972 dock strikes, which was about far more than a wage hike. I argue the dock strike helped launch the legendary Durban Strikes that erupted about two months later though the historical literature still understates the dockers’ import. As the title indicates, my book compares the histories of dockworkers in two historically significant port cities, their many decades of collective action, and why they used their power on behalf of racial equality and freedom.

Often missed in commentary on today's globalizing economy, dockworkers have ability to harness their role, at a strategic choke point, to promote labor rights and social justice causes. My book, a comparative study of Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, illuminates how unions effected lasting change in some of the most far-reaching struggles of modern times. First, dockworkers in each city drew on longstanding radical traditions to promote racial equality (including on Page 99). Second, they persevered when a new technology--container ships--sent a shockwave of layoffs through the industry. Finally, their commitment to black internationalism and leftist politics sparked transnational work stoppages to protest apartheid and authoritarianism. Dockworker Power brings to light surprising parallels in the experiences of dockers half a world away from each other.

Learn more about Dockworker Power at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara M. Benson's "The Prison of Democracy"

Sara M. Benson is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at San Jose State University and teaches at Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Prison of Democracy: Race, Leavenworth, and the Culture of Law, and reported the following:

Page 99 marks the first page of the book’s final chapter. The chapter is about political prisoners and the various legal avenues that brought masses of political activists to the nation’s oldest and largest federal prison. These large groups of activists were members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Black Twenty-Fourth Infantry, and the Partido Liberal Mexicano, who were convicted of violating wartime laws about mutiny and incendiary speech. The chapter is about how these forms of mass incarceration during world war one relied on long histories of punishing movements that challenged the prison’s hold on the idea of democracy, but these incarcerations also backfired—they led to cross-racial forms of solidarity at the very moment when prison officials sought to implement a system of segregation in federal prison institutions. Against this larger backdrop, page 99 imagines how these groups, who met and engaged each other in prison, had “known one another before.” These cross-racial forms of critical engagement and struggle were disciplined out of existence as the federal prison system emerged as a deeply racialized and segregated institution through prison programming and prison leisure—prisoners were part of segregated sports teams and were used as part of the prison’s disciplinary regime to inflict violence on other groups. The prison’s purpose was to make enemies of those who had once challenged together the prison’s relationship to democracy. Despite these efforts, these ideas about the prison’s relationship to solidarity and state violence culminated in a cross-racial movement in the 1970s that almost succeeded in bringing about Leavenworth’s end.

When the Bureau of Prisons declared that Leavenworth was obsolete in the early 1970s as a direct result of the organizing of prisoners across racial lines, the promise of closure was quickly replaced with the idea that Leavenworth could be made fit for democracy. Leavenworth’s revivification was part of the reconfiguration of the federal prison system at precisely the moment when mass incarceration was taking root. The book’s purpose is to challenge the idea mass incarceration is a recent moment in time; it is instead part and parcel of American statecraft and American democracy. It ends by suggesting that the exit from mass incarceration is not decarceration, but the reimagining of a theory of the state without a prison at its center.

Learn more about The Prison of Democracy at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colin Asher's "Never A Lovely so Real"

Colin Asher is an award-winning writer whose work has been featured in the Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. An instructor at CUNY, he was a 2015/2016 Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Asher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren, and reported the following:

Never A Lovely so Real is a literary biography of Nelson Algren, a once-famous mid-century American author. And because it is, I felt that I needed to both accurately present the facts of Algren’s life in my composition, and also capture his perspective, to suggest, in my own writing, something about the way Algren saw the world and wrote about it.

Some writers dwell in the realm of parable and care little for their characters’ inner lives—others prefer the reverse, and emphasize their protagonists’ psyches while rejecting the urge to moralize. Some are drawn to environment, or plot, or rely on stylistic flourishes to carry their books. But Algren had a unique sensibility. He emphasized relationships over individual struggles, and he was a generous writer, who even gave depth to his minor characters. In everything he wrote, no matter how challenging the subject matter was, there was always musicality to his prose, rhythm—and those were the elements of his style and perspective that I tried to replicate in my book.

Luckily, when I turned to page 99 of Never a Lovely so Real, I found a paragraph that attempts to achieve all of those goals. At this point in the book, Algren has just returned to Chicago after being released from a Texas jail. He had stolen a typewriter a month or so earlier so that he could complete his first novel, and been caught. After a brief trial, he hopped freight trains back home, and moved in with his parents. This was in 1934, during the Great Depression, and his family was struggling. They had just lost their tire shop, their only means of supporting themselves, and they were about to lose their home. His parents, Gerson and Goldie, had never gotten along well, and as their financial situation deteriorated their relationship did as well. On page 99, I describe their marriage during that period as follows:

Time had distilled their relationship to its purest form by then. She was the gloved fist, and he was the heavy bag – when she swung, he swayed. “Get out of my sight,” she hollered when she saw him. “You just get downstairs.” And Gerson went. There was a rocking chair near the furnace in the basement, and a bottle of Rock and Rye, and sometimes he spent entire days down there, rocking and drinking, rocking and drinking.

Visit Colin Asher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vaughn Scribner's "Inn Civility"

Vaughn Scribner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Arkansas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society, and reported the following:

Right in the middle of page 99 is one of my favorite lengthy quotes in Inn Civility:

There are also among us Unlicensed Houses, (too many such!) where our Young Sparks Drink and Game, and Revel for whole Nights together, and Perhaps Every Night. And such Vile Houses will be kept…[for] the Club of Rakes, truly so call’d. And these spend whole Nights in Drinking and Gaming, it is to be fear’d at their Fathers and Masters Expence. The quantitys of Wine and Brandy-Punch drank (or rather destroy’d) by these Clubs, is incredible. So that their practice is an Excess of Riot with an Emphasis.

I love this quote for a few reasons. First, this mid-eighteenth-century New Englander’s diatribe wouldn’t seem that odd if it were to appear in a modern newspaper. So many Americans still love to complain about the drinking, revelry, and “excess of riot” which occurs every weekend in college town bars (well, all bars, I suppose).

I also love this quote because it rather concisely gets to Inn Civility’s core argument: that urban taverns—the most numerous, accessible, and popular public spaces in colonial America—provide an ideal lens through which to dissect colonists’ fantasies and anxieties surrounding the rocky development of a “civil society” in British North America. As today, citizens hoped to direct their society around mercurial notions of liberty, harmony, and order. And, as is still the case, these efforts were fraught with contradiction and dissension.

Take the “a Club of Rakes” quote, for example. A “Rake” was a wealthy “gentleman” who reveled in what is now called “slumming it.” He would strap his sword to his side, don his finest clothes, and dive head-first into lower-class taverns with a drunken cadre of friends, where they would turn tables, accost fellow tavern goers and servants, and drink to excess. Then, the next day, they would go back to their “genteel” lifestyle of balls and tea tables without any repercussions. Many of those men who made the “rules,” in short, didn’t necessarily have to play by them. Everything, and nothing, has changed.

Visit Vaughn Scribner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greg Beckett's "There Is No More Haiti"

Greg Beckett is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western University in Ontario.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes near the end of the second chapter, called “Looking for Life,” which explores how people try to build meaningful lives in the midst of the precarious and informal economy of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city. The men who’s stories I tell in this chapter are all struggling to make a living, working as artisans, taxi drivers, guides, and fixers. At this point in the chapter, we are reading about how political and economic uncertainty has made it even more difficult to look for life. Page 99 presents the end of a story about a dispute between two taxi drivers over potential clients. A younger driver named David poached the clients from an older, and well-known, driver named Frantz. After a heated argument, Frantz was left without the lucrative fare. Later, Frantz and several other men discuss the incident; they come to feel that David has acted in the wrong, since he knowingly approached the clients after Frantz had already booked them, a serious violation of the unstated norms among taxi drivers. As they talk about the story, the dispute comes to stand for a much wider problem in Haiti: the end of respect (respè).

As we learn on page 99, respect is a key value in Haitian culture, and also a quite complicated word. It means respect, honor, character, and dignity. It is meant to be given to other people, and it is also received by those who act responsibly and who fulfill their social obligations. In the story at hand, David had not just stolen clients; he had also disrespected Frantz. In the days and weeks after the dispute, the story came to stand as an example not just of a lack of respect but also of the way in which the very possibility of giving and getting respect has disappeared. Another driver sums up this position, saying “In Haiti today, people don’t have any respect.” This is the essence of how crisis feels in Haiti; the many crises people face every day have made it impossible to live a meaningful life, to live according to key cultural values like respect. Page 99 is a small glimpse into the broader theme of the book: what if feels like to live through the breakdown of a whole way of life.

Learn more about There Is No More Haiti at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas Walton's "Singapore, Singapura"

Nicholas Walton is a journalist and writer. He is from Newcastle but has lived all over Europe and beyond. He now lives in Delft, in the Netherlands, and works at the European office of the World Resources Institute.

Walton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Singapore, Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency, and reported the following:

My foolproof guide to writing a book is to write the book that you wanted to read but couldn’t find. When I flew into my new life in Singapore I faced bookshelves of books that I didn’t want to read about the place. There were romantic bodice-rippers about Sir Stamford Raffles, forensic accounts of government public spending priorities, glamorous guides to the infinity pools and boutiques, and lots telling the story of how the Japanese had captured the place back in 1942.

What there wasn’t was a book that lifted the lid on perhaps the world’s most astonishing country and explained how, why and what next, while entertaining and engaging page after page.

Think about it this way: almost exactly 200 years ago Raffles stood on the shores of a muddy island with a few hundred fishermen on it. He thought it was ideal for Britain and the East India Company, and he was right. It had few natural resources, was too hot, but was in a spectacular place, a pinch point between the Indian Ocean and East Asia. Singapore thrived.

Then, in 1965, the place became independent, and this tiny, unlikely equatorial dot became even more wildly successful. Its income is up there with the world’s best, and it’s world class in everything from education to crime.

How? Why? What next? Well, now there’s a book on that, knitted together into a single-day, 33 mile sweaty hike from one end to the next. This allowed me to tell the stories, speak to the people, ask the questions, and lift the hood and have a poke about in Singapore’s engine.

It’s a remarkable story, from government-designed communities to chewing gum bans, permits for table-top dancing, and the life-lessons of a teenage Singaporean skinhead. It explains Singapore, and explains why the future may not be quite as golden as the present.

It is, in short, the book that I wanted to read when I first arrived on the curious island, 20 miles north of the equator. So is that obvious from flicking through and finding page 99? No. In my book that page is simply another jaunt through the British imperial humiliation at the hands of the Japanese. I’m not sure I agree with Ford Madox Ford…

Visit Nicholas Walton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Virginia Morell's "Becoming a Marine Biologist"

Virginia Morell is the New York Times bestselling author of Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures as well as a regular contributor to National Geographic magazine and a contributing correspondent to Science. She has also written for Smithsonian, Discover, The New York Times Magazine, International Wildlife, Audubon, Slate, and Outside, among other publications.

Morell applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Becoming a Marine Biologist, and reported the following:

Becoming a Marine Biologist profiles Robin Baird, the leading expert on the cetaceans--dolphins and whales--of Hawai'i. Most of us rarely look back at the trail of crumbs and occasional whole cookies that led to our present careers. But that's what my book offers: a study of one man's path from his childhood love of animals to becoming a marine biologist and director of Hawai'is Dolphins and Whales project. On page 99, Baird meets another cetacean biologist, Jeff Goodyear, who'd invented an inexpensive and simple method for attaching time-depth recorders (TDR tags) to wild whales. Instead of surgically implanting the tags, which sometimes harms the animals, Goodyear used $2.00 suction cups that are made for car roof racks to keep the devices attached. The meeting seems to be a crumb. But it will lead to a very large cookie for Baird.

Goodyear and Baird met in 1989 while Baird was pursuing his PhD at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. By this point in the book, readers have learned that Baird has struggled to become a scientist; he's had to overcome his fear of mathematics and statistics, and taken an indirect path--through ecology--to study killer whales. Despite his handicaps--he's poor, recently orphaned, and painfully shy--he's driven to succeed. He's just earned his doctorate, but is struggling--as fresh PhDs often do--to establish a career. Page 99, while ostensibly about Goodyear's TDR design, is actually about how perseverance and learning a new and special skill can transform a person's life. In that sense, page 99 "reveals the quality of the whole" book, which describes how via hard work and luck, Baird navigates around numerous obstacles to achieve his dream.

Cetacean researchers are often frustrated by their limited view of the animals they study; they typically only see the animals when they surface to breathe. The TDR tags record and store data about the depths of a whale or dolphin's dive and the time he/she stays below the surface before resurfacing. Goodyear helped Baird modify his original TDR design so that the tags could be attached noninvasively to killer whales. For his dissertation, Baird studied the different feeding behaviors of two types of killer whales--the fish-eating residents and mammal-eating transients--around Vancouver Island. Scientists had started studying these marine mammals only in the 1970s. They noticed that the large, resident pods hunted only fish, while the smaller groups of transients seemed to concentrate on other marine mammals, such as seals, dolphins, and the calves of baleen whales (grays and humpbacks). Baird set out to discover why the residents and transients behaved so differently. Why did hunting fish lead the residents to live in large, chatty social groups? Why did the transients live in smaller pods and keep close to the shoreline? How did their foraging preferences and techniques affect their social behaviors and reproductive success? Baird followed the transient killer whales for six years, recording observations on 26 transient social groups. Using a crossbow or long pole, he also attached TDR tags to one transient killer whale, and six residents; these data revealed how the two types differed in how and where they foraged. Baird discussed his tagging work at a marine mammal conference, and was immediately invited by Karsten Schneider, another marine biologist, to help him attach TDR tags to the bottlenose dolphins he studied in New Zealand.

These dolphins, however, bolted and disappeared when the tags hit them; the animals behaved unnaturally and most of the tags fell off. The project seemed to be a failure. But Baird explains that failures in science are as important as successes--one of many bits of advice he offers to those who dream of pursuing a similar career. He and Schneider published an article reviewing marine biologists' efforts to use tags on a range of cetacean species, and pointed out that researchers could not assume that non-invasive tags would work on all dolphins and whales. Thanks in part to this article, other scientists began to view Baird as an expert on TDR tagging. This special skill set him apart from many other young marine biologists, and helped lead to his first major grant in Hawai'i. Yet most of his success stems from his ability to recognize an opportunity--something not taught in schools. The page 99 passage captures this side of Baird, too. What it does not reveal about Baird is his passion for the animals he studies, or the love he brings to his work. That is better captured in the chapters where I join him at sea in Hawai'i as he searches for such elusive species as pantropical spotted dolphins and pygmy killer whales. He knows which species like to look at people in boats, which flee at the faintest sound of a motor, and which ones suffer from naval sonar exercises. His research has helped marine mammal managers draw up protections for the whales and dolphins of Hawai'i--and readers come to see that Baird's love and compassion for these animals and the sea are the true underpinnings of his success.

Learn more about Becoming a Marine Biologist.

Coffee with a Canine: Virginia Morell and Buckaroo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael J. Sullivan's "Earned Citizenship"

Michael J. Sullivan is Associate Professor in the Graduate International Relations Department at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Earned Citizenship, and reported the following:

Earned Citizenship is about earned citizenship for immigrants through a variety of forms of service, including military service, community service, and caregiving for dependents. Page 99 highlights the importance of military-based earned citizenship. However, this particular page is not just about immigrants. Rather, page 99 is about gender equality, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship for current and aspiring American citizens. The page highlights the role of women in the military, and the continued significance of military service as a potential responsibility for all young Americans.

I begin page 99 by quoting President Carter’s February 8, 1980 address “seeking additional authority to register for noncombat service to our Nation.” Since 1980, immigrant men, including unauthorized immigrants, have been required to register for Selective Service. In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court in Rostker v. Goldberg (1981) upheld male-only registration, but Justice Marshall dissented, arguing that the exclusion of women from “a fundamental civic obligation” violated the U.S Constitution’s “equal protection of the laws.” I end page 99 by supporting Marshall’s view, and adding that the end of gender-based combat restrictions has made contentions against gender-neutral Selective Service requirements moot. As my book went to press, on February 22, 2019, U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Texas, Gray H. Miller, ruled that male-only Selective Service rules were the product of historical gender stereotypes, and that “if there ever was a time to discuss “the place of women in the Armed Services,” that time has passed.

The discussion on page 99 of Earned Citizenship speaks about an enduring and progressively more open pathway to earned citizenship through military service in the United States. The preceding chapter showed how past generations of African-Americans and Latinos successfully claimed citizenship rights based on their wartime military service. Chapter 4, where page 99 is situated, does not simply celebrate this legacy of earned citizenship. It also points to areas for improvement, including abolishing barriers to earning and retaining U.S. citizenship through military service that have resulted in the deportation of U.S. veterans. As a whole, Earned Citizenship makes a moral argument for policy reforms to reward immigrant contributions across all of society, from caregiving to military service, as important civic services meriting a pathway to citizenship.

Learn more about Earned Citizenship at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Suzanne Hinman's "The Grandest Madison Square Garden"

Suzanne Hinman holds a Ph.D. in American art history and has been a curator, gallerist, museum director, professor, and an art model. She owned an art gallery in Santa Fe and then served as director of galleries at the Savannah College of Art and Design, the world's largest art school. Her interest in the artists and architects of the American Gilded Age and the famed Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire grew while associate director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. The author continues to reside near Cornish as an independent scholar.

Hinman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York, and reported the following:

Page 99 occurs in the chapter “Continental Influences” and within Part Two, “Building a Palace of Pleasure.” The Palace of Pleasure was the name by which Stanford White’s fabulous 1890 Madison Square Garden was known, as America’s largest structure built primarily for entertainment, including two lavishly decorated theaters, a huge arena, banquet hall, restaurant, and eventually a roof garden where White would be murdered in the “crime of the century.”

The chapter title “Continental Influences” refers to a trip to Paris made by Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1889, planned as an opportunity to explore European advances in architecture, technology, and perhaps even more importantly, nude female sculpture, for Saint-Gaudens had been commissioned to create such a piece of yet undetermined subject to top what would be America’s tallest tower.

In Paris the two men, dear friends as well as collaborators, would visit the Exposition Universelle for inspiration. The remarkable Palais des Machines, a very modern building of glass, wrought iron, and transverse steel trusses that enclosed the world’s largest interior space, would strongly influence the construction of the Garden. And among the fine arts on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts was a life-sized plaster model of Diana, Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt--a sprightly nude by Saint-Gaudens’s old friend and former protégé, Frederick MacMonnies.

In turn, MacMonnies had been influenced by his teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguiѐre:

Master Falguiѐre, known in France as the great sculptor of flesh, had himself already completed two well-known depictions of the goddess Diana. The first was a life-sized plaster for the Salon of 1882. Instead of the chaste young virgin of myth, it presented a rather coarse-faced, heavy-footed, stoutly middle-aged figure who seemed to critics to have just removed her corset. This Diana in all her very lifelike modernity garnered much notice and was popularly reproduced for parlor decoration as both a marble bust and as a full-figure bronze reduction just 18 inches high, while cheap plaster copies were sold to passers-by in the boulevards.

Saint-Gaudens would go on to create an 18-foot nude Diana for the Garden’s tower that would eventually reign over the World’s Columbian Exposition, a slightly smaller, more beautifully refined version for the tower in 1893, and within a few years 2-foot bronze reproductions sold to the upper-class public by Tiffany & Co.

Visit Suzanne Hinman's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Grandest Madison Square Garden.

--Marshal Zeringue