Jesse Wozniak's "Policing Iraq"

Jesse S.G. Wozniak is Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Policing Iraq: Legitimacy, Democracy, and Empire in a Developing State, and reported the following:

Summary of page 99: Students and trainers alike at the Sulaimaniyah (Iraq) police training center discuss the high levels of education and physical fitness they believe are of central importance to those who would like to join the force. These interview excerpts are offered as evidence of the message police personnel are receiving regarding their role and the functions they are asked to fulfill. These desired recruit qualities speak to the powerfully originative role police play (and will continue to play) in the shaping of the young Iraqi state. Similar in many ways to American police training, where technical discussions are emphasized over basic principles of law, democracy, or basic human relations, this focus on the physical requirements and aspects of the job sends a clear message of what is considered “real” policing and serves to marginalize the myriad other activities police will be called on to perform.

In this case, the page 99 test is moderately successful. This page obviously omits a great deal of the study, but would give the reader a fairly accurate understanding of one key argument. The overarching argument of the book is that the United States did not even set out to create a democratic police force in Iraq, but instead one that would prove useful in their drastic restructuring of the Iraqi state and economy, most centrally ensuring continued access to oil and the forced implantation of extreme neoliberal economic reforms. The priorities offered by interview respondents demonstrate some of the central problems with both the design and implementation of the reconstruction of the Iraqi police force. While high educational standards sound great, the reality of policing in Iraq is that the job is more often seen as a last resort of desperation. So while there are some highly educated police, most are people who have no interest in being police officers but only joined to escape still-pervasive unemployment. One respondent argued that a common piece of advice given to the homeless is to go join the police because they’ll accept anyone. The emphasis on physical perfection and domination, while similarly as unmet among recruits as were ideal educational standards, reveal many of the problems with the very conception of policing found in the US-instituted training regime. In a democratic police force, physical abilities should be dwarfed in importance by interpersonal skills – the ability to talk to and understand a wide swath of community members, de-escalate situations, and the like. However, in the training of Iraqi police, such skills are virtually unheard of, as are any discussions of the plethora of new rights guaranteed by the new constitution or really any discussion of the rights and responsibilities of police in a constitutional democracy. Rather, police are clearly designed to be essentially an auxiliary army, rooting out subversives to prop up the fledgling, US-backed government and its dictates.

Visit Jesse Wozniak's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan A. Stewart's "Governing for Revolution"

Megan A. Stewart is an Assistant Professor at American University's School of International Service. Her research investigates how and why political actors create new social, economic and political orders, and the enduring consequences of these endeavors.

Stewart applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Governing for Revolution: Social Transformation in Civil War, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Governing for Revolution, I introduce my first case study: the Eritrean War of Independence. On that page, I talk about my main motivating puzzle: why do some rebel groups undertake costly or challenging governance programs during war? I also describe the methods and data I use in the chapter. To that end, the 99th page test is about 40% accurate: there is a taste of the motivating question and some description of the archival data I use in what is probably my most compelling case. But readers do not get an answer to my puzzle, and I'd like to hope that my answer is at least slightly more compelling than the question I pose.

What is my answer, then? I argue that to understand why rebels implement challenging governance programs during war, we have to first understand the actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Chinese Civil War. During the war, the CCP invested heavily in transforming the social order, including attempting to fundamentally restructure status hierarchies, such as inequalities between classes, races and genders. To achieve such change, the CCP introduced certain governance programs that directly altered status hierarchies, such as land reform, but these programs were sometimes unpopular and met with occasional resistance. The CCP could have saved these programs until after war, when it would be easier to do, but the CCP did not. Throughout the process, the CCP also propagated their wartime governance strategy globally, referring to their experience as a model to be imitated by others.

Later rebel leaders emerged in a global context saturated with information about the CCP, but not all rebel leaders rely on this information. What determines the extent to which leaders use the information about the CCP’s experience are rebel groups’ long-term goals. Once rebel leaders decide what their goals are, they need to figure out how to achieve them. When rebel groups have revolutionary goals, they have similar ambitions to the CCP. These shared ambitions caused rebel leaders to decide to imitate the CCP’s model and they implemented the same governance strategies during war as the CCP did. Over time, rebel leaders with revolutionary goals sometimes even received material benefits by conforming to the CCP's model. When rebel goals are less revolutionary, however, they copy less of the CCP's governance strategies and they are less likely to implement the same challenging governance programs that the CCP did.

Visit Megan A. Stewart's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elesha J. Coffman's "Margaret Mead"

Elesha J. Coffman is an associate professor of history at Baylor University. Her first book was The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (2013).

Coffman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith, and reported the following:

All of the books in the Oxford “Spiritual Lives” series are compact, intended to introduce readers to the spirituality of figures who were famous for something other than being spiritual. Page 99 is almost exactly the midpoint of the book, and it finds Margaret Mead and the rest of the world at a crossroads.

The year is 1942. The United States has recently entered World War II, and the famous anthropologist has published And Keep Your Powder Dry, a book that she hoped would give Americans confidence to fight and help the British better understand the thousands of American servicemen arriving on their shores. Mead’s extended lecture tour of the UK that year kept her away from her third husband, Gregory Bateson, and their baby daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Referring to And Keep Your Powder Dry, page 99 notes,

The book is not remembered as one of Mead’s best, but its domestic focus and religiously tinged moral earnestness marked an inflection point in her life. Her years of traveling the world for new bits of information and developing her own personality through a rapid succession of relationships were mostly behind her. She was marshaling the resources of maturity, and she would need them all as the violent end of World War II birthed the challenges of the Atomic Age. Not everyone she was close to would accompany her through these transitions.

Page 99 represents the book in several ways. There’s a lot going on in just a few lines, as there had to be in a brisk biography of a woman who lived a very full life. The published bibliography of her work lists nearly 1,400 print publications, and her archive, with more than 530,000 items, is the largest in the Library of Congress. The pace of major events during her life span (1901-1978) was staggering as well.

While tensions were especially high in 1942, Mead was always trying to change the world while holding a few key relationships together. It was never easy. Lastly, although Mead insisted that she never lost her religion after choosing to be baptized into the Episcopal Church at age 11, for much of her career her faith was subsumed under moral earnestness. The missing half of the phrase in her book title exemplifies this hiddenness. Mead used the full quote only in the book’s last line: “Trust God—and keep your powder dry.”

Learn more about Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen McCabe's "John Stuart Mill, Socialist"

Helen McCabe is assistant professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, John Stuart Mill, Socialist, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in Chapter 3 of my book, which is about Mill’s critical engagement with contemporary forms of socialism, and specifically in the sub-section about Mill’s conceptual account of socialism – that is, how did he define socialism philosophically rather than (as he did elsewhere) looking at the details of specific forms of socialism (e.g. Saint-Simonism, Fourierism, Owenism). “The distinctive feature of Socialism”, Mill says, “is not that all things are in common, but that production is only carried out on the common account, and that the instruments of production are held as common property”. In addition, the “division of the produce” of labour was done publicly, and in accordance with “rules laid down by the community” based on principles of justice rather than – as in contemporary society – chance, and the accident of birth. If there were inequalities, these were justified by, and to, the whole community, and justified by the principles of justice endorsed by that community.

Page 99 also details how Mill drew four key distinctions between types of socialism: how the “physical means of life and enjoyment” are distributed; the “scale” of the association (from small communities to the whole state); the means advocated for implementing socialist schemes (from instrumental to immediate, through violent revolutionary overthrow of the state); and the extent to which the schemes were intended to be self-sufficient and self-contained, or to interact with other, mutually-dependent socialist associations.

The first of these distinctions is the key to his differentiation between “socialism” and “communism”: communists want an equal division of the “physical means of life and enjoyment” (i.e. of articles of consumption), and socialists allow for some inequalities, depending on the principles of distributive justice they employ. The Saint-Simonians and Fourierists were socialists: Owen and Cabet communists, as was Louis Blanc, though only endorsing equal shares only “as a transition to a still higher standard of justice, that all should work according to their capacity, and receive according to their wants”.

Does this give a good idea of the book?

This page would be a good place for a browser to explore a number of key themes and points from my book. Firstly, it makes plain Mill’s serious intellectual engagement with socialism – which itself may be something of a surprise, as Mill is most famous as a “founding father” of liberalism.

Secondly, it shows that socialism, to Mill, was a varied set of ideas for social reform, with some key shared commitments. Importantly, it was not Marxism. We tend to have quite a monolithic view of “socialism” as being “Marxism”, and page 99 reminds us that socialism has a long and varied history, both pre- and post-Marx.

Relatedly, the way Mill draws distinctions between forms of socialism gives a guide to his own preferences: some justified inequalities in the distribution of articles of consumption; (mainly) small-scale; gradualist and organic; and mutually-dependent. This is one of the radical elements of Mill’s socialism, as a common, though stereotypical, view of socialism is of a state-wide, revolutionary/violent, insular system, “levelling down” to achieve equality.

Similarly, page 99 highlights key elements of Mill’s own socialism (though this becomes clearer later in the book), and how he could see his ideas as “under the general designation of Socialist”. Mill supported collective ownership of property via producer-cooperatives (with some state ownership of land, and industries which tend to monopoly, though this might still be at a local scale). He also endorsed several socialist principles of distribution (especially Fourier’s) as better than the current unjust and indefensible distributions based on inherited structural inequalities (of class, race, and sex); equal shares having some advantages; and Blanc’s idea being “still higher”. This insight into Mill’s principles of distributive justice is key, as this is little-studied in Mill scholarship, and is central to his socialism.

Lastly, labouring on the “common account” with a “public” determination of distribution links to another important element of Mill’s socialism – a transformed social ethos whereby people see themselves as part of a community of equals. This does not mean there may not be any inequalities (of power, wealth, status etc.) but that these need to be justified, and everyone needs to acknowledge that these inequalities are for the common good. This is the fundamentally “social” element of “socialism”, and stands in contradistinction to the received view of Mill as a defender of “individualism”, particularly in his most-famous book On Liberty, which my book seeks to challenge.

Learn more about John Stuart Mill, Socialist at the McGill-Queens University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Koshatka Seman's "Borderlands Curanderos"

Jennifer Koshatka Seman is a lecturer in history at Metropolitan State University in Denver. Her work has appeared in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses and the Journal of the West.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo falls under the subheading “The Journey is Part of the Cure.” In part, it tells the story of Priscilliano Martínez, a Tejano laborer who came to the curandero, Don Pedrito Jaramillo in the late 19th century for a cure for a wound to his head. On his way to Don Pedrito’s rancho in Los Olmos (in the South Texas Rio Grande Valley), Martínez claimed that he began to feel better. This was a common description by those who were healed by Don Pedrito: the afflicted began to feel better on the journey to the cure.

If a reader opened to page 99 of Borderlands Curanderos they would get a sense of this book – of the stories it tells and the arguments it makes. Curanderismo, the Mexican faith healing practice that the two subjects of this book, Don Pedrito Jaramillo (1829 -1907) and Santa Teresa Urrea (1873-1906) practiced, strengthened and healed individual bodies, like Priscilliano Martínez. But the curanderismo practiced by Jaramillo and Urrea also healed the social body, those people on the margins of state and institutional power in the turn of the century borderlands who faced governments, as well as the growing institution of professional medicine, that deemed non-white “others” as dangerous, outside the bounds of the nation, sometimes even diseased or more prone to carrying disease.

Borderlands Curanderos is a dual biography (part one examines Teresa Urrea, part two Don Pedrito Jaramillo) that shows how two popular curanderos provided culturally resonant healing, sustenance, and inspiration to many in the turn-of-the century borderlands, like Priscilliano Martínez.

Learn more about Borderlands Curanderos at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Holtzman's "The Long Crisis"

Benjamin Holtzman is an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College. He studies the intersection of political and social history in the United States, with particular focus on politics, capitalism, race and class, cities, and social movements.

Holtzman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, and reported the following:

A daring reader who tosses caution aside and begins The Long Crisis on page 99 would find themselves thrust into a discussion about the condition of parks across twentieth-century New York City. The page comes early in the book’s third chapter, “Remaking Public Parks,” which is about the transformation of the municipal park system in the late twentieth century. On page 99, I describe how throughout the history of the park system, New Yorkers “had reason to grumble about park maintenance.” By the time John Lindsay was elected mayor in 1965, “‘dissatisfaction with maintenance and supervision of parks’ had become near universal.” Lindsay and several spirited Parks Department Commissioners pledged to improve park conditions and to reverse the decline in park usage. These officials, I note, began to encourage non-traditional uses – hippie ‘be ins,’ puppet shows, large musical performances – as they attempted to bring New Yorkers back into parks.

Because 99 is among the initial few pages of the chapter, it largely serves to set the stage for the narrative that follows: how over the 1970s and 1980s the park system became reliant on private organizations to run city parks. The page 99 test therefore receives a passing, though not stellar, mark. On the one hand, this page would give readers a sense of the dissatisfaction residents had long felt about a critical municipal service like the park system – a frustration that heightened as decreased municipal budgets over Lindsay’s terms resulted in worsening park conditions. It was in part this dissatisfaction that spurred city residents to begin to look beyond government and to private sources in order to improve public services like parks. On the other hand, page 99 does not show this process in motion. It does not, for example, discuss how working-class residents began to form community groups to care for their neighborhood parks or how more affluent New Yorkers began to fundraise for – and then demand a greater say over the management of – parks in more wealthy areas and business districts.

Ultimately, the heart of the book lies in tracing how urban dwellers responded to the tumultuous conditions of 1970s and 1980s New York and illustrating how their actions transformed the city toward one more reliant on private sector and market-based solutions. Though I hope page 99 provides an enticing glimpse of The Long Crisis, readers would be more likely to gain a better picture of how these processes unfolded on other pages of the book.

Visit Benjamin Holtzman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Baldwin's "Fighting the First Wave"

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. His publications include Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (2005), Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (1999), and The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (2014).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fighting the First Wave: Why the Coronavirus Was Tackled So Differently Across the Globe, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Fighting the First Wave, deals with the speed at which various nations imposed their first attempts to control the pandemic when it hit their territory. This can be measured in various ways – from the 100th case, say, or from the third death. Not all such measures reveal anything interesting, but some do suggest that those countries that imposed measures quickly and decisively were more likely to control the pandemic better than the laggards.

Page 99 is not a bad place to get a sense of what the book is about. Its subject is why the world’s 200 nations dealt so differently with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The disease is the same everywhere, our scientific understanding of it was achieved at the very start of the pandemic, as the virus was identified, and so the problem that each nation faced was broadly the same. Nonetheless, there followed a Noah’s ark of different attempts to tackle it.

Broadly, these can be grouped into three categories: (1) those nations, in Asia especially, but including Australia and New Zealand, that imposed targeted quarantines on the sick, the infected, and their contacts, thus isolating them and protecting the vast bulk of the population; (2) those, such as Japan, the Netherlands, Belarus, Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Sweden, where the aim was to slow the spread of the pandemic so to spare the hospital system being overwhelmed, but otherwise let the pandemic rip in hopes of achieving herd immunity and thus a return to normal life before a vaccine was developed; and finally (3) those countries in North America and Europe that realized it was too late to clamp down any longer, yet were not willing to tolerate the high mortality entailed by herd immunity, and therefore imposed arguably the most painful and expensive strategy, namely massive shutdown of society and the economy and its attendant violation of individual civil rights and huge economic costs.

Why different nations came to such various conclusions is the question the book seeks to answer.

Learn more about Fighting the First Wave at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Raksha Pande's "Learning to Love"

Raksha Pande is a lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University in the UK.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Learning to Love: Arranged Marriages and the British Indian Diaspora, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book comes towards the beginning of Chapter 7, which is titled ‘The Ties that Bind,’ and subtitled ‘Marriage, Belonging and Identity’. I use ethnographic and participant-observation research methods in my work. On page 99, the reader will meet one of my key respondents, Dr Shusheela Sharma (pseudonymous name). Most of page 99 includes a long section of dialogue from a transcript of the interview I conducted with her.

Dr Sharma: Well, we are a very traditional family. So, we wanted a traditional girl who would be following the way we have lived our life and been brought up rather than someone from here, who would be more Westernised in every way. Westernised in every way means language; most of the girls who are brought up here don’t know our language, they have forgotten it a long time back, they don’t dress in our Indian way, they don’t eat our food. I have no objection to eating Western food but as a regular thing just Western food and not Indian food. No. Westerners don’t know much about our religion, they don’t follow our religious ways; so, I can’t see why we should forget everything we ever learned and become Western. You’ll never become British or whatever if you live outside your own country, you will never be able to become a person of that country, you’ll always be a foreigner. If I am going to be a foreigner, I prefer to be my own country foreigner rather than sort of half and half, you know, neither here nor there...that’s the reason why we prefer arranged marriage.

The page 99 test works well for Learning to Love by answering a question, I am sure, most readers of my book will ask – Why do British Indians have arranged marriages? The verbatim quote also gives the reader a flavour of the Indian-English register of the speech of my first-generation participants.

The interview excerpt shows that the compelling need to preserve their identity as a migrant in a foreign country is behind the British Indian desire to encourage their children to have an arranged marriage. Dr Sharma’s refrain that she would rather be ‘my own country foreigner’ illustrates her unapologetic view that she will never fully belong to foreign Britain and as such she needs to cling to her Indian identity. However, Dr Sharma’s view was a minority opinion among my participants. Most believed that arranged marriages (which they claimed to have modernized) were not antagonistic to the ‘British way of life’ but are an essential component of their British and Indian identity.

The test does not work so well in highlighting one of the core findings of the book which shows the various modifications that have been made to traditional forms of arranged marriages to give them a modern British Indian makeover. The book examines different types of marriages such as semi-arranged marriages, love-cum-arranged marriages and arranged weddings that make up the spectrum of practices that fall under the umbrella term arranged marriage. This spectrum of arranged marriage practices with the different degrees of choice and agency that it affords is seen as evidence of their commitment to the modern values of their adopted country. It also highlights several instances of how romantic love is weaved into arranged marriages through the idiom of ‘learning to love’ - whereby British Indians incorporate the rituals of dating and romance within arranged marriage. Their focus on recoding arranged marriage as a practice marked by the conscious exercise of embracing a kind of British modernity can be read as the affirmation of a desire to highlight the contestations over what it means to be British and Indian. Overall, the book shows that for British-Indians, the different ways in which they modify and modernize traditional arranged marriages were reflective of something more than the natural evolution of this cultural practice – it was a conscious act of laying claim to a British identity and performing British Indian citizenship.

Discover more about Learning to Love at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Gavin Frank's "Flight of the Diamond Smugglers"

Matthew Gavin Frank’s new nonfiction book is Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa.

He is also the author of the nonfiction books, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food (2015), Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer (2014), Pot Farm (2012), and Barolo (2010); the poetry books, The Morrow Plots (2013), Warranty in Zulu (2010), and Sagittarius Agitprop (2009).

Frank applied the “Page 99 Test” to Flight of the Diamond Smugglers and reported the following:

From page 99:

“A vast heaving crater. A world of dust, drought, dysentery, and flies, disease and despair, where some dug up a fortune, and others dug their graves.”

In order to further demonstrate their loftiness here, and to deprive those who lived in this “vast heaving crater” of even the most meager of distractions, Rhodes and Barnato once kidnapped as many of the diggers’ pet pigeons as they could. With these abducted birds, they staged “gentlemen’s” shoots with visiting magnates on the muddy streets around the corner from Barnato’s boxing club (the restored heartwood floor of which still bears the silver crescents of many coin edges pressed between the slats, and, in one corner, an amoebic spread of white threads that appear to be the barbs of a 130-year-old pigeon feather, coffined in shellac). Rhodes and Barnato believed they’d live, if only in the corporate argot—like the diamonds themselves—forever.

Page 99 of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers is more wormhole than microcosm. Like the string of a tin can telephone, page 99 tethers the late 19th-century horrors that attended the founding of the De Beers corporation in the diamond fields of Kimberley, South Africa to the present-day consequences of those horrors. Here, we have De Beers co-magnates Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato aggressively carving out lives of luxury from the sludge of the diamond pits, oftentimes at the expense of the health and comfort of those workers who labored therein. Many of the workers trained and kept pet pigeons as a distraction from the working conditions, and the attendant despair.

But, in 1893, Rhodes felt that the birds could be used to smuggle diamonds out of the mine, and so his security officials, were given off-the-books, commission-based benefits for catching smugglers, which resulted in many a fabricated charge, which itself resulted in the beating or maiming of the falsely accused. Rhodes hired mercenaries to slaughter the Matabele peoples who lived along the South African-Zimbabwean border, clearing the land for his mining endeavors. Rhodes renamed Zimbabwe “Rhodesia,” after, of course, himself. Each mercenary was given a specific reward depending on the number of kills, beginning with two claims and nine square miles of personal property. Once the mines were established, some of these mercenaries stayed on as mine security.

And yet, still today, there stand lionizing statues of Rhodes throughout the UK and South Africa, (though, at the urging of protestors, some are slated for removal). Page 99, then, addresses history’s long wake, and influence on the present. It addresses various founding principles of the diamond industry. The “illicit” pigeons (who loom large in the book, of course) also make a doomed cameo appearance. If page 99 can’t be said to be representative of the entire book necessarily, it can be said that the page contains a sprinkling of many of the book’s ingredients.

Visit Matthew Gavin Frank's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson's "A Story of Us"

Lesley Newson is Research Associate at the University of California, Davis. Peter Richerson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution, and reported the following:

A person who opens our book at page 99 will find three and a half paragraphs about marriage and sex! The text is however, hardly titillating. We are biologists and look at the role marriage and sex played in human evolution. Every human alive today is part of a lineage. We exist because our ancestors produced offspring that survived to produce offspring themselves. Marriage makes the survival of offspring more likely. It’s a “social tool” that binds families together and helps to ensure that babies will have the support of a father’s family as well as its mother’s family.

On page 99 we summarize the evidence that leads us to believe that the culture of our ancestors who lived in Africa 100,000 years ago already included the custom of marriage. One reason is the near ubiquity of marriage customs in the cultures of humans living today.

Another reason we give is that the human body is adapted to a life of restricted sexual relationships. Compared to our closest living ape relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) human males have quite small testicles and they make weak underpowered sperm. This suggests that, during our recent evolutionary history, sperm from different men didn’t have to race up the uterus and fallopian tubes to fertilize an egg. Human sperm are joggers, not runners, probably because restricted mating customs gave them an open field. Our immune system is also poorly adapted to unrestricted mating. We are very vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases. Some of the people who lived 100,000 years ago might have mated in an unrestricted way, but they are less likely to have been our ancestors. The support network for their babies would have been less secure and they would have been more at risk of being made sick or infertile by sexually transmitted bacteria and viruses.

Page 99 gives readers some idea of the nature of our book. It’s a book that aims to help readers understand themselves by describing their ancestors and the lives they lived, based on research from a wide range of disciplines. The ancestors described on page 99 had a much simpler culture than any humans living today but they were very similar physically and genetically.

In the case of our book, however, the usefulness of the page 99 test is limited. Our book isn’t just about our ancestors who lived 100,000 years ago. It begins with our ape ancestors who lived seven million years ago and finishes with the present day.

But a more important limitation is that page 99 reveals only one of the three styles of writing that make up the text of our book. Chapters 2 through 8 each contain a story (a science fiction story about the past) that illustrates what we think a life might have been like for one of our ancestors born during the featured time. Afterwards we summarize the evidence we drew on to write the story. Other pages (e.g., page 91) are partly fiction and partly evidence summary but page 99 is made up entirely of text that summarizes evidence. These evidence summaries don’t talk much about specific research, but they are linked to notes at the back of the book which contain the third style of text. The notes give more details and/or recommend further reading.

(We have written the book in this “multilevel” way because we think that a story of our origins should be for everyone, not just people trained in science.)

Learn more about A Story of Us at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue