Jo Napolitano's "The School I Deserve"

Jo Napolitano, a journalist for more than 20 years, has written extensively for The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Newsday. A Northwestern University graduate and Columbia University Fellow, hers was an unusual path: Napolitano was born in Bogota, Colombia, abandoned at birth, placed in an orphanage and nearly died of starvation before she was adopted to the States. Her book, The School I Deserve: Six Young Refugees and Their Fight for Equality in America, chronicles the civil rights battle waged across the country on behalf of immigrant children turned away from the nation’s public schools.

Napolitano applied the “Page 99 Test” to The School I Deserve and reported the following:

The book tells the story of a young Sudanese refugee named Khadidja Issa who was forced to sue her local school district for the right to enroll. The case went to trial in the summer of 2016 in the swing state of Pennsylvania on the eve of the most contentious presidential election in modern American history, one in which immigrants, particularly young Muslim refugees like Khadidja, were openly derided. In this passage, found on page 99, one of her attorneys calls into question the school district’s decision to send Khadidja and other young refugees to a for-profit alternative school called Phoenix Academy. Aimed at credit recovery, Phoenix offered a no-frills education to students looking to speed up their education to graduate quickly:

The notion that these newcomer students, who spoke almost no English, would somehow gain something by starting their education with sped-up instruction—the only type offered at the alternative campus—made no sense, he said.

Rothschild’s argument was solid and he appeared to be gaining ground. In what seemed like an early breakthrough, Judge Smith started to question the value of graduating a student who might not have the education or skills they needed to succeed in life. “I’m also curious as to the relationship between getting that piece of paper known as a diploma, and actually, truly, educating someone, such that they could be a productive member of our society,” the judge said.

Here was the opening Rothschild had been looking for all morning. It was his chance to plant the seed that Phoenix wasn’t living up to its promise.

Rothschild said that in order to judge the merits of the alternative program, the court must consider the Castañeda v. Pickard court case. Filed against the Raymondville Independent School District in Texas by Roy Castañeda, a father of two Mexican American children, the case was tried in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas in 1978. Castañeda, through his attorneys, argued that the district grouped children in such a way that those with Mexican heritage received a sub-standard education.

A major outcome was a three-pronged test to determine whether schools were taking “appropriate action” to address the needs of English language learners as required by the Equal Education Opportunities Act. According to the Castañeda standard, educational programs for non-English–speaking students must be based on a sound educational theory, implemented effectively with sufficient resources and personnel, and evaluated to determine whether they are effective in helping students overcome language barriers.

Phoenix failed by every measure, Rothschild told the court. And the diploma its graduates received at the end of their time there was dubious because many could not read or write English and had not advanced in their other coursework because of it, leaving them unprepared for the future, whether they wanted to attend college or join the workforce.

Page 99 reflects the central aspect of the book: what do we owe immigrant kids in terms of their education? If a child arrives to the States in their late teens unable to speak English, what can we expect of them as their eligibility for a free education winds down? It gives a glimpse into the courtroom drama of this entire matter.

Visit Jo Napolitano's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Kanigel's "Hearing Homer’s Song"

Robert Kanigel is the author of nine books, most recently Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry. He has received many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, the Grady-Stack Award for science writing, and an NEH “Public Scholar” grant. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and was the basis for the film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Kanigel and his wife, the poet S. B. Merrow, live in Baltimore.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Hearing Homer’s Song and reported the following:

Page 99 of my new book, Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry, is the second page of a chapter called “The Homeric Question,” about just how and where the Iliad and the Odyssey came to be:

If there was a Homer who’d written, sung, gathered, dictated, or revised the epic poems, when and where did he live?

If there was a historical siege of Troy, in which the Iliad was rooted and Odysseus’s return from which formed the basis for the Odyssey, when was it?

If there was something like an “original” Iliad and Odyssey, when and how had they come to be?

If they’d been written (as most readers of the epics had little cause to doubt) when and how were they first set down? And if not, how did they take the form known to us today?

The subject of my biography, Milman Parry, made these and related questions the subject of his life’s work. My book is a kind of literary detective story exploring how Parry came to his radical conclusion, which rocked the world of classical studies -- that no one “wrote” the Odyssey or the Iliad, at least in the way we mean it, but rather, that they were the product of an entirely different creative process – that they were composed orally by generations of singers. For this overturning of long accepted ideas, Parry has been called “The Darwin of Homeric Studies.”

Browsers of page 99 of the book would get an excellent idea of the intellectual subject of the book, but no idea of the dramatic human story behind it – no sense of Milman Parry’s emergence out of nowhere, in California, his early marriage, his personal and intellectual adventures at the Sorbonne in Paris, his visits to the former Yugoslavia, where he sought to confirm his theories among living epic singers, or his sudden and mysterious death by a gunshot wound, at age 33, in a Los Angeles hotel room.

It’s interesting to me that the page 99 material about the Homeric Question was what had drawn me to Parry from the outset. I am not a classical scholar but a writer by trade; I learned about the Homeric Question from a (real) character I had researched for one of my earlier books, On an Irish Island.

Funny how things work. Kismet, I think they call it.

Visit Robert Kanigel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua M. Scacco & Kevin Coe's "The Ubiquitous Presidency"

Joshua M. Scacco is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. He is an expert on political communication and news media, having published more than 50 academic articles, book chapters, and public research papers as well as provided commentary for national and local news outlets.

Kevin Coe is a Professor of Communication at the University of Utah. He has published more than 50 academic articles and chapters, and is the coauthor of The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.

Scacco and Coe applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Ubiquitous Presidency sets up a case study examining the influence of then-President Barack Obama’s discussion of health care, specifically the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, often called “Obamacare”). We explain it this way: “Our interest is in understanding if and how Obama was able to break through the noise and influence the communicative environment during the first two ACA open enrollment periods.” We do this through a semantic network analysis looking at the connections that exist between the language Obama used in tweets about the ACA and the language that news organizations and the public used.

Does the page 99 test work in this case? Not directly. This page introduces a single case study (of Obama’s communication about the ACA) within a chapter that is also a single case study (of the role Obama played in transforming the presidency). Although the Obama case does reflect how presidents, in general, can use digital technology in attempts to influence segments of the population (one argument in the book), the full work is much more expansive in scope than any one president, outreach approach, or outcome. We include detailed case studies of Obama and Trump, but our focus in most of the book is on over-time trends—in presidential communication, news coverage, and U.S. culture.

The book’s argument, which inspires the Obama example on page 99, is that the traditional “rhetorical presidency” has given way to something different: the ubiquitous presidency. The ubiquitous presidency is a way of explaining the contemporary presidency, especially the significant changes it has undergone over the past several decades. “Ubiquity” signals that contemporary presidents create a nearly constant and highly visible communicative presence in political and nonpolitical arenas through the use of mass as well as targeted media. They do this to achieve longstanding goals, namely visibility, adaptation, and control. But, in an environment where accessibility, personalization, and pluralism have become omnipresent considerations, the strategies presidents use to achieve these goals are very different from what we once knew. We chronicle this important shift through analyses of thousands of presidential speeches, large Twitter datasets, two national surveys, and an experiment. The results help make sense of why the presidency today feels so different from what we once knew.

Learn more about The Ubiquitous Presidency at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeff Eden's "God Save the USSR"

Jeff Eden is Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary's College of Maryland. His books include Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (2018) and Warrior Saints of the Silk Road: Legends of the Qarakhanids (2018).

Eden applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War, and reported the following:

Readers who open the book to page 99 may wonder what the author had been smoking for the previous 98 pages. They are dropped into the middle of one of the strangest stories of the twentieth century: the unexpected, unprecedented alliance between Stalin's militant atheist state and traditional Muslim religious leaders—an alliance forged at the height of the war against Hitler. Stalin tapped Muslim leaders to rally their public to the war effort, and many obliged (some of whom had previously done time in the Gulag). These strange bedfellows produced a distinctive “Soviet-Islamic propaganda” in wartime, which included calls to a “jihad” against Hitler.

This bizarre alliance came after nearly two decades of brutal religious repression, during which tens of thousands of Muslims (as well as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others) were “purged,” and thousands of mosques were seized, shuttered, or turned into barns. What did Soviet Muslim leaders get out of the deal with Stalin? Why would Soviet Muslim citizens pay any mind to religious leaders who had made a “deal with the devil”?

These questions are at the heart of the book, and page 99 answers them— the Test passes with flying colors here! On this page, we see how Muslim leaders used their new, state-backed platforms to negotiate new concessions for their communities, and to carve out new spaces for religious freedom in the atheist environment.

Here, we discover that zakat, a traditional Muslim form of charity that had been suppressed by Soviet authorities in the 1920s-30s, was revived in wartime, as it could be used (among other things) to raise funds for the Soviet Red Army. Charity and fundraising also took place during sacred holidays like Ramadan and Eid al-Adha, which Muslims could once again celebrate out in the open, without fear. As page 99 explains, “Some of the charity provided by local Muslims was redistributed by the government for the purposes of buying livestock for the [holiday] sacrifice. After the sacrifice, the meat of this livestock was provided to families in need.” It is a story stranger than fiction: in wartime, the atheist Soviet state used the great redistributive powers of its Communist “command economy” to provision devout Muslims during their Feast of the Sacrifice.

Learn more about God Save the USSR at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vanessa O'Brien's "To the Greatest Heights"

Vanessa O’Brien is British-American mountaineer, explorer and author. She is the first woman to reach Earth’s highest (Everest) and lowest (Challenger Deep) points, the first woman to climb the Seven Summits in 295 days and is the first British or American woman to summit K2. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and an Honorary Advisory Board Member of the Scientific and Exploration Society.

O’Brien applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, To the Greatest Heights: Facing Danger, Finding Humility, and Climbing a Mountain of Truth, and reported the following:

From page 99:

When the mountain is nearly vertical, you may opt to do something called front pointing – slamming the metal teeth on the front of the crampon into the ice or snow – but you do it sparingly, because it doesn’t take too long to burn out your calves and shins. Staggered by how hard it was initially, I tried to calm myself down as everyone else zipped off into the sunset. After struggling through for a while, I looked up and felt an unpleasant bolt of panic. I was alone. The ghostly white penitents thronged around me, serrated heads bowed to pray, dripping and whispering.

“Hey!” I called. “Hey, where are you guys?”

For a terrifying moment, there was no answer but the Gregorian chant of the wind. Then Daniel appeared. He waved from the top of a formation that seemed miles away.

“Hey!” I waved back and tried to keep my voice level. “Wait up!” He gave me a thumbs-up and disappeared again.

“Keep calm. Keep up.” My own take on British climbing motivation. My mind raced through a number of mini mantras. “I am Scylla the rock—Marathon Man—I can endure any pain.”

We did this again the next day and the day after that. Over the boulders and through the penitentes, back through the penitentes and over the boulders. By the end of the third day, I had my mojo back and was keeping up with the team, but I wasn’t over- confident. That first day kept me humble. I was probably praying harder than the penitentes were.

A local lama came to perform the Puja ceremony, and once the ritual was completed, the Sherpa were ready to climb. However, the next morning there was a 6.9 magnitude earthquake in India near the Nepalese border, and it was strong enough that we felt it in Tibet. Daniel made a reconnaissance climb up to Camp 1 at 21,000 feet and found that landscape significantly changed.

Page 99 falls within Chapter 8 which is the first chapter in Part II: Climb and Punishment. Chapter 8 is the story of my first summit of an 8,000-meter peak, and because it is my first, I am not as experienced as the other climbers. The page 99 test lets the reader know the content of the book contains a first-person account of climbing. It also gives the reader a fair sense of the writing style in that on this page there is a hint of humor and self-deprecation.

However, from a strategic point of view, the page 99 test fails to capture the essence of the book reviews that cite how daring, insightful and inspirational the book is. That is because many of the powerful back stories take place over several climbs to avoid subjecting the reader to repetitive acclimatization trips up and down the mountain. From a practical perspective, the page 99 test fails to fully explain some technical items on page 99 because they are explained earlier, terms like crampons or penitentes. Once readers understand that penitentes are sculpted snow and ice formations up to fifty feet high that looked like parishioners on their way to mass to early explorers, some of the backhanded jokes make more sense on page 99… I was probably praying harder than the penitentes were.

Visit Vanessa O'Brien's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kim Todd's "Sensational"

Kim Todd is the award-winning author of several books, including Sensational: The Hidden History of America's “Girl Stunt Reporters”, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, and Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America, winner of the PEN/Jerard Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Her essays and articles have appeared Smithsonian, Salon, Sierra Magazine, Orion, and Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies, among other publications. She is a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis with her family.

Todd applied the “Page 99 Test” to Sensational and reported the following:

Readers opening to page 99 would find disgraced publisher of the Chicago Times James J West with a suitcase full of cash, urging one of his former editors to flee with him to Europe in 1889, before he returns to Chicago and is arrested for financial malfeasance. They would also encounter Eleanor Stackhouse, pseudonym “Nora Marks,” a journalist for the rival Chicago Tribune, investigating the practice of locking up boys as young as 10 with adult men in the Cook County jail. At the bottom, she has just talked her way into the facility to conduct interviews with the young prisoners.

This page offers a glimpse of the whole but an incomplete one. Sensational is a book with a large cast of characters and interweaving stories, so a browser just flipping through wouldn’t know why West was important or that Stackhouse was part of a wave of young women in the 1880s and 1890s working in a new genre pioneered by undercover reporter Nellie Bly. On the other hand, West’s seedy tale captures the way that “stunt reporters” were often hired by marginal papers with little to lose, as their work wasn’t considered quite respectable. The page describes Nora Marks: “Like other reporters doing stunts, Marks was in her mid-twenties, courageous, and curious about the hidden side of her city,” effectively locating her within the movement. Finally, page 99 includes an illustration of a promotion for Marks, blaring in large type: “Where has Nora Marks been during the last two weeks? Not idle surely. She has had a new adventure—more unique than any before undertaken by a newspaper reporter.” This shows the value and popularity of this kind of writing.

The rest of Sensational tracks the rise and fall of the “stunt reporters” like Marks who flooded into newspaper offices in the decade after Bly’s exposé of Blackwell’s Insane Asylum for Women in 1887 and wrote first-person stories that captured readers’ imaginations and uncovered institutional abuses. It also explores the distinct, but parallel, innovations of journalists Ida B. Wells and Victoria Earle Matthews, and argues that this cohort of women developed many of the techniques of investigative reporting and literary nonfiction still employed today.

Visit Kim Todd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Luce Mulry's "An Empire Transformed"

Kate Luce Mulry is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Bakersfield. She received her PhD from New York University. Her research and writing investigate the intersection of environmental history, the history of science and medicine, and ideas about the body in the early modern Atlantic world.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic, and reported the following:

Page 99 begins with an assessment of claims made by a group called the Bedford Level Corporation in the late seventeenth century that they had successfully drained the fens of eastern England and had therefore earned their reward in the form of lands that had long been used communally by fen communities. But I quote a satirical ballad from the era to highlight the Corporation’s possible failures. The ballad references “drown[ed]” fenlands, suggesting the Corporation members had celebrated prematurely and had not earned the lands they had taken in reward for their incomplete work.

I next describe how the Bedford Level Corporation was one iteration of a type of early modern English “projector” who sought investment and support for their drainage projects. These varied drainage “improvers” promised to make wetlands more accessible to travelers and officials. However, residents of those communities living in or near Irish bogs or English fenlands often valued the inaccessibility of wetland landscapes to outsiders. The final paragraph reiterates this point by gesturing to religious communities who had been drawn to the inaccessibility of the fen landscapes and had valued the isolation for centuries.

If readers were to open An Empire Transformed to page 99, they would have a pretty good feel for the topics and arguments covered in the chapter and the book as a whole.

Page 99 falls within a chapter that examines the efforts of a group of individuals, known as the Bedford Level Corporation, who sought to drain vast areas of the fenlands in eastern England in the seventeenth century. They claimed their drainage projects would benefit the residents of the fenlands by turning unhealthy wetlands into healthy and productive fields made ready for year-round cultivation.

Several topics covered in page 99 relate to the book in a few ways. First, this page focuses on the idea of “improvement” as one of the arguments made by a variety of Restoration officials, as well as Bedford Level Corporation members, to justify their drainage projects. They claimed their work would increase the value of the land by transforming it from wet to dry. This is a regular argument made by all kinds of drainage “improvers” to justify their projects and to receive support. Second, while the different chapters in this book cover a range of environmental improvement projects initiated during the English Restoration, two of the five chapters highlight projects of fen, swamp and wetland drainage, and contemporaries’ debates about how to control these unruly watery landscapes (and the potentially unruly people who lived in them). In other words, discussing drainage projects represent a significant portion of the book. Third, the page suggests that the meanings of landscapes were contested. Residents of the fens regularly resisted the projects and policies of “improvers” and other representatives of an expansive English government. Finally, the page suggests that the outcomes of seventeen-century improvement projects were far from certain. By highlighting a satirical ballad pointing out the Bedford Level Corporation drainage failures (and the return of “Captain floud”), readers are reminded that officials’ desires to transform domestic and colonial landscapes and assert authority over the residents of a far-flung and growing English empire were often unsuccessful.

What’s missing from this page, however, is a reference to drainage as a public health measure. One of the justifications offered by “improvers” was their claim that transforming lands they deemed unhealthy also made residents healthier. These claims about improving public health by transforming the landscape are central to the book but absent from page 99.

Visit Kate Mulry's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Audrey Clare Farley's "The Unfit Heiress"

Audrey Clare Farley is a historian of twentieth-century American fiction and culture with special interests in science and religion. Prior to writing full-time, she taught literature at University of Maryland, College Park, where she earned a PhD in English.

Her first book, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, tells the story of a 1930s millionairess whose mother secretly sterilized her to deprive her of the family fortune, sparking a sensational case and forcing a public debate of eugenics.

Farley applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Unfit Heiress and reported the following:

From page 99:

Maryon admitted that she gambled, but insisted that she had never used Ann’s money for it.

It was during this time, Maryon had asserted, that Ann’s sex addiction was made known, as she was found sleeping in bed with a boy of the same age at an institution. This occurred a few years after Maryon had caught Ann masturbating as a toddler. The first incident, Maryon had excused. She didn’t want to believe her daughter’s ways. But the second revealed to her that her daughter was absolutely deranged.

To further demonstrate that Ann was feebleminded, despite her best efforts, Mrs. Cooper Hewitt claimed that Ann had refused to be educated, misbehaving at one institution after another in order to be expelled. “Ann has never cared for anyone who could teach her or help her get along in life,” she told a newspaper. Maryon also cited the intelligence test performed by the state psychologist shortly before the procedure. According to Scally’s notes, Ann had poorly responded to the questions about American history. As a result, she’d been classified as a “high grade moron.” Mrs. Cooper Hewitt noted that the two doctors agreed with this assessment, as they’d already publicly stated.

Maryon didn’t know it, but with the label of “moron,” Ann had actually tested higher than two other clinical categories: idiot and imbecile. According to the state-sanctioned intelligence test that she’d been given (the Stanford-Binet test), the heiress had a mental age of eleven. The state applied the term imbecile to those with a mental age between two and seven, and idiot to those with one under two years. These clinical categories had been supplied by psychologist Henry Goddard, whose intelligence rubric (little more than a civics test, privileging those with knowledge of American his­tory) provided the basis for the Stanford-Binet, created by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman and used to diagnosis Carrie Buck.

Page 99 perfectly captures my book. It combines sensational storytelling with historical research. It gives readers a glimpse of the mother-daughter feud that propels the narrative. And it explores one of the book’s primary themes: how female sexuality has been pathologized, subjecting women—even white heiresses—to extraordinary state violence.

At this particular moment in the story, socialite Maryon Cooper Hewitt has just attempted suicide. She’s in a New Jersey hospital, having fled California after criminal mayhem charges were filed against her there for having two doctors sterilize her daughter without her knowledge—all to cheat Ann out of her father’s estate. The news of the case has riveted the public, and Americans are eager to hear what Maryon has to stay for herself.

Maryon’s defense: Ann has “erotic tendencies,” and she failed an intelligence test administered by a state psychologist. As becomes clear throughout the book, sexuality and imbecility were thought to be one and the same. Sexually deviant women were assumed to be intellectually disabled, and intellectually disabled people were assumed to be sexually deviant. This was just one of the many junk scientific notions of the eugenics movement in America.

But why were sexual deviance and "feeblemindedness" perceived to be so dangerous to society that forcible sterilization provided the only solution? Why would two doctors operate upon Ann because of her personal life and supposed mental defects, but not upon women with, say, diabetes? In large part, because sexual deviance and feeblemindedness were thought to more seriously threaten the purity of the white race. Feebleminded women were prone to cross the color line. (And in fact, Maryon would go on to make much of the fact that Ann once flirted with a “Negro” train porter.) At a time when Americans feared the rising number of immigrants and African Americans beyond the rural South, this simply could not be tolerated.

Visit Audrey Clare Farley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Waterfield's "The Making of a King"

Robin Waterfield is an independent scholar, living in southern Greece. In addition to more than twenty-five translations of works of Greek literature, he is the author of numerous books, including Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire and Taken at the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece.

Waterfield applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Making of a King: Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon and the Greeks, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Making of a King, I’m in the middle of discussing the Ptolemaic empire. Ptolemy II, having married his full sister Arsinoe (the first ever sibling marriage among the Ptolemies, but not the last) inaugurated the worship of himself and Arsinoe as the Sibling Deities. I explain that worship of a living human being as a god was not impossible within Greek religion, and that kings were especially likely to become divinized because they could be seen as performing remarkable, even miraculous deeds. And I say this about brother-sister marriage: “Brother-sister marriage was supposed to guarantee the purity of the bloodline, advertise the solidity of the royal family, and secure stability by eliminating the possibility of rival claimants to the throne; the king’s offspring would effectively be clones of himself, and so every generation of Egyptian kings took the same name.”

The page does not give a good impression of the book as a whole, except in so far as it is packed with interesting information! My book is essentially about the reign of Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedon, but I spend the first part of the book introducing his reign by giving the historical background. I go through the various threats and difficulties he was likely to face when he came to the throne, and one of the most important of these was the ongoing hostility between Macedon and Egypt. So on page 99 I’m still in the middle of explaining the Ptolemaic system with which Antigonus would have to deal. It’s the last chapter of this introductory section, and then the rest of the book is about how Antigonus gained the Macedonian kingship, and what he did with it during his long reign from 276 until 239.

Visit Robin Waterfield's website.

The Page 99 Test: Taken at the Flood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeremy Brown's "June Fourth"

Jeremy Brown is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at Simon Fraser University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989, and reported the following:

If readers open June Fourth to page 99, they will find a title page for "Massacre," Part Three of the book. Flipping two pages ahead to this part's first page of text, browsers arrive at Chapter 9, "The Beijing Massacre as History." The chapter begins, "The People’s Liberation Army massacred unarmed civilians in Beijing on the evening of June 3, 1989, escalating into the early hours of June 4." I then mention different estimates of how many people died during the massacre, from 479 to 2,600 dead, before promising to "answer with more specificity the question of who died, where they died, and how they died."

The page 99 test reveals what June Fourth is trying to achieve and what it promises: naming the victims of the massacre and detailing their encounters with the PLA to underscore how senseless and unnecessary it was for an army to shoot its way through a city full of protesters. The victims included a watermelon vendor, young men trying to buy breakfast, a mother purchasing medicine for her sick child, and people looking out their windows to see what was happening.

My victim-centered account of the Beijing massacre is the central part of the book. The book's first two parts detail what made people in China happy and angry during the 1980s, predisposing some to join a protest movement that attracted a diverse range of supporters and raised hopes for a more transparent, less corrupt political system. Part four of June Fourth shows what happened nationwide in 1989, from friction between Han and non-Han people to violence, rage, and indifference in cities and villages outside Beijing. The book ends with a focus on the massacre's aftermath, which included a purge that mixed falsehoods and fear. During and after the events of 1989, protesters, observers, and Communist Party leaders repeatedly wondered what if events had unfolded differently and obsessed about critical turning points. June Fourth examines the alternative paths that people imagined at the time, showing that a violent end to the protests of 1989 was far from inevitable.

Visit Jeremy Brown's website.

The Page 99 Test: City Versus Countryside in Mao's China.

--Marshal Zeringue