Alison Richard's "The Sloth Lemur's Song"

Alison Richard is the Crosby Professor of the Human Environment emerita and senior research scientist at Yale University. She previously served as Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and in 2010, she was awarded a DBE (Dame Commander of the British Empire) for her services to higher education.

Richard applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, The Sloth Lemur’s Song: Madagascar from the Deep Past to the Uncertain Present, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…Thud went our feet, and sweat dripped off my chin. Then a crackle mixed with the thud, and I felt a whisper of dry wind. Ten more footsteps and we reached the top of the pass. The litter crackled noisily, a warm dry wind blew away sweat, and westward, down from the pass, a sunlit vista of silvery dry forest opened up. The climate and rainforest of the east had vanished behind us.

Where and when did the plants originate that compose today’s grand diversity of vegetation? Almost a century ago, Henri Perrier de la Bâthie pointed out how closely many of Madagascar’s plants resemble species found elsewhere and, based on these resemblances, he assigned them to groups according to their likely land of origin. These origins, he proposed, included not only nearby Africa and islands in the West Indian Ocean but also places much further away. Plants do not walk but, if he was right, they certainly move around a lot. The evidence was limited, however, and the matter remained one of intense speculation.

With acceptance of continental drift as a feature of Earth history, two possible explanations emerged for similarities between plants on the island and in different regions. One was that Madagascar was a kind of crossroads in Gondwana that incorporated species from all the lands around it. The other was that plants mostly made their way to Madagascar by sea or air after it became an island. But there was no way of knowing which or what combination of these scenarios best represented what actually happened.

Molecular and morphological approaches used today in tandem show that Perrier de la Bâthie’s conclusions, reached from morphology alone, turn out to be largely correct…

Would browsers opening The Sloth Lemur's Song to page 99 of get a good idea of the whole work?

Yes and no! On the ‘yes’ side: I frequently use my own experiences to illustrate general points – in this instance, the abruptness with which climate and vegetation sometimes change across this continent-like island. A second ‘yes’: the book recounts Madagascar’s long journey through space and time to the present, transformations in climate, vegetation and wildlife along the way, and how they happened – in this instance, how the island’s vegetation came to be. On the ‘no’ side, page 99 gives no hint that the book includes the origins of the Malagasy people, the voyages entailed in reaching the island, the timing of their arrival, and their subsequent environmental impact. A second ‘no’: reading page 99 made me smile, because elsewhere I emphasize Perrier de la Bâthie’s deep prejudices (glad I gave him his scientific due here!).

I enjoyed this test. I like my page 99 (she says shamelessly), but the test made me reflect anew on my ambitions for the whole book. A major thread, deeply important to me, is missing from page 99. It comes from the idea that we are a species of storytellers, and the first and last chapters reflect on the power of stories to shape, and distort, how we see and interpret the world. Perrier de la Bâthie’s century-old account of Madagascar is effectively a story of Paradise Lost, using evidence that is flawed at best and plain wrong at worst. Yet it still dominates public perceptions of Madagascar. I set out to tell a new and different story. But however well (or not) I have done that in scientific terms, it is only one way of conjuring the land and its history. Landscapes are culturally meaningful as well as subjects for scientific study and a tapestry of stories, not just one - even mine! – will have the best chance of sustaining Madagascar’s people and environments into the future.

Learn more about The Sloth Lemur’s Song at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Skye Cleary's "How to Be Authentic"

Skye C. Cleary is a philosopher and writer. She teaches at Columbia University, Barnard College, and the City University of New York, and is the author of Existentialism and Romantic Love and co-editor of How to Live a Good Life. Cleary’s writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Aeon, The Times Literary Supplement, TED-Ed, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets. She won the 2017 New Philosopher Writers’ Award and was a 2021 MacDowell Fellow.

Cleary applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment, and reported the following:

Page 99 of How to Be Authentic is the conclusion to my chapter on romantic love. If a browser opened to that page, they would find a one paragraph summary of authenticity in the context romantic relationships, including: “Love is neither destined nor found, but created”. Page 99 concludes with a bridge to the topic of marriage and gives an inkling as to what’s coming in the next chapter. The test doesn’t sum up the whole book, but it does reveal two critically important situations that present challenges and opportunities to becoming authentic.

Beauvoir’s views on love are what drew me to her philosophy in the first place so it feels apt that this is where the test brings us! The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was particularly concerned with the way that women’s situation as “The Second Sex”—that is, subordinate to men—perverts us from creating relationships in authentic ways. For Beauvoir, “authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms,” which means that lovers respect one another as individuals, support one another’s flourishing, are generous towards one another and the world around them, and stretch together toward shared goals. It also means that lovers choose to be together and choose to create a relationship together. If people are coerced into a relationship, such as through family or social or financial pressures, then it can’t be an authentic connection. Choice is key. Maybe you say you can’t choose love? Well, probably you can’t choose whether to be attracted to someone, but you can choose whether to pursue a relationship and with whom. If you feel you don’t have a choice, then take a look around to see if you’re being oppressed or if you’re beholden to your passions. While love is sometimes so intoxicating that it feels you’re destined to be with one another, that’s the hormones talking. Love cannot complete us. Any feeling of wholeness is fleeting and illusory. Love isn’t written in the stars. Relationships are never a given. We have to work towards creating harmony—not only in romance but in our connections with other people and the world around us.

Visit Skye Cleary's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mansi Choksi's "The Newlyweds"

Mansi Choksi is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and two-time Livingston Award Finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and more. She lives in Dubai with her husband and son.

Choksi applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Dawinder pressed his wrists into his eyes to stop the tears from falling out. “We are dirty children,” Neetu said mournfully as she rested her head on his shoulder.

When Neetu and Dawinder started to pack their bags, Sachdev hovered around them. He said he had become so attached to them that he could no longer do without them. Couldn’t they stay a little bit longer for the sake of their old Baba? He reminded them about the couples who had left the shelter to be with their families, only to become victims of honor killings.

“Please understand, children, it is not safe,” he said. “Why do you want to go and get killed?”

The Test works. Page 99 of The Newlyweds cuts straight to the heart of the theme that defines this book.

In the book, I write that the pursuit of love and its aftermath is ultimately a kind of displacement. Years after the three couples in this book defy their families to be together, they continue to long for their acceptance.

Some of us are raised to think of romantic love as a corruptible force or a subversion of Indian values. Some of us think of romantic love as a great adventure against the tyranny of tradition. In India, the idea of modernity is a moving frontline between the anarchy of freedom and the peaceful order of tradition, and in my opinion, nowhere is this crisis of meaning deeper than in the choices young people make about who to love. My hope for readers is to leave with the understanding that in the end, we make our calculations between tradition and rebellion and arrive at our own truths about Indian modernity.

Visit Mansi Choksi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jehanne Dubrow's "Taste: A Book of Small Bites"

Jehanne Dubrow is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas. She is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom (2021), and a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Colorado Review, and the Southern Review.

Dubrow applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, and reported the following:

Here’s what you’ll find on page 99 of Taste: A Book of Small Bites:

Today, I’m trying to find an old photograph of my mother. She’s smiling at the camera, a blanketed weight in her arms. She is just about to finish feeding me, about to button her shirt again, to dab a drop of milk from my lips. In my memory, the snapshot is cast in the golden light of late afternoon. It has the shine of archetype, like a classical image of the Madonna with her child. And because I can’t find the photo album to confirm what I remember—I’m sure Mommy glowed with joy, that she was radiant in the picture—I search the Internet instead for representations of mothers and babies. I want to see how the old painters depicted this most mundane of actions, Mary feeding her holy son, a sliver of breast visible to the viewer. I want to find paintings that show us these famous bodies—divine and biblical—as human, the Madonna tired as any new mother might be after nights of tiny…

It's the opening paragraph from a brief essay called “The Tiny Thread of Milk,” which appears at the start of the umami section of the book (Taste is divided into five parts focusing on the five known tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami). “The Tiny Thread of Milk” focuses on breastmilk—a substance that is rich in umami—and looks at paintings by da Vinci and Mary Cassatt to explore visual representations of nursing mothers.

Page 99 of Taste is very typical of the book as a whole. It’s lyrical, a little intimate, but also prepares the reader for close reading and scholarly thinking.

I created Taste for Columbia University Press’s No Limits, which is a series dedicated to interdisciplinary philosophical writing. So, Taste isn’t a personal essay but something more hybridized. In the book, I write about foods as well as substances like sweat and tears. The book includes meditations on novels and poems, works of religion and philosophy, fairytales and mythology, operas, plays, movies, and the plastics arts. I am not a philosopher by training. Taste is idiosyncratic. It’s grounded in my sensibilities as a poet and the particularities of my personal history. My hope, when people read Taste, is that they will imagine what their own versions of such a book would include. When you think of the important tastes in your life, what are they? What do they say about you, who you are, your origins?

Learn more about the book and author at Jehanne Dubrow's website.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (April 2010).

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (November 2012).

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow and Argos.

Coffee with a Canine: Jehanne Dubrow & Lola and Bandit.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rohan Mukherjee's "Ascending Order"

Rohan Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was previously Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is a former Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the MIT Security Studies Program and non-resident Fellow at the United Nations University in Tokyo.

Mukherjee applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ascending Order sets the scene for a case study of the United States as a rising power in the 19th century. The page discusses how US leaders after the Revolutionary War emulated the practices of the European great powers in the domain of maritime law, as a way of gaining acceptance and entry into the club of great powers that dominated the international order. The page also begins to describe how access to this club was restricted after the Napoleonic Wars, when five European great powers (Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France) formed the Concert of Europe in 1815.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well for my book, because it shows how a rising power may follow existing rules to gain acceptance among the great powers.

Ascending Order is about the strategies rising powers pursue to achieve equal status with the great powers. The great powers maximize their own power and international status by acting as an exclusive club that co-manages the international order, or the rules and institutions of international cooperation and conflict. Rising powers seek entry into this club as aspiring great powers and co-managers. But which strategy will they choose to assert their claim to equal status?

The central insight of the book is that a rising power’s choice of strategy will depend on the openness and fairness of the core institutions of the international order. A state’s leaders are more likely to cooperate with an order that is open in terms of who gets to lead and fair in terms of how rules are applied across members. Rising powers are less likely to cooperate when the leadership ranks of the order are closed to new members or its rules are biased in favor of the great powers, or both.

Page 99 of Ascending Order provides a glimpse at how the US followed existing maritime law when the international order was relatively open and fair, in the early 19th century. It would soon become less open under the Concert of Europe, leading US leaders to alter their strategy of seeking equality with the great powers. Similar patterns can be found in the other case studies of the book, on Japan and naval arms control between the two World Wars, India and nuclear nonproliferation in the Cold War, and China in the post-Cold War ‘liberal international order’.

Visit Rohan Mukherjee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph O. Chapa's "Is Remote Warfare Moral?"

Joseph O. Chapa is a US Air Force officer and holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He has served as a Predator pilot and instructor of philosophy at the Air Force Academy. Chapa has published on military ethics in academic journals including Social Theory and Practice and The Journal of Military Ethics, and in online venues such as War on the Rocks and The Strategy Bridge. He currently leads the Artificial Intelligence Cross-Functional Team in Air Force Futures and serves as the Department of the Air Force's chief responsible AI ethics officer.

Chapa applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, Is Remote Warfare Moral?: Weighing Issues of Life and Death from 7,000 Miles, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Just because moral injury is separate from, and often lacks the acute trauma of, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it is no small thing. Long before the term moral injury was coined, [J. Glenn] Gray described it—and the way a soldier might respond to it—in combat:

It is a crucial moment in a soldier’s life when he is ordered to perform a deed that he finds completely at variance with his own notions of right and good. … he discovers that an act someone else thinks to be necessary is for him criminal. … He feels himself caught in a situation that he is powerless to change yet cannot himself be part of. The past cannot be undone and th present is inescapable. His only choice is to alter himself, since all external features are unchangeable. (Gray, The Warriors, 184)

Moral injury, of course, falls on a spectrum. Perhaps not all examples will be as life-changing as those Gray describes. He seems to suggest here that a soldier must “alter himself” only if the task he is required to perform is, in some sense, beyond the pale—so far outside what he believes to be morally justifiable that he knows that committing the act will injure him. And moral injury is often characterized by feelings of guilt and shame. The counterintuitive revelation from a number of recent studies, however, is that combatants can experience moral injury even when the acts they commit are morally justified and even when they commit no wrong. This finding is a surprising phenomenon. Taking a human life can be a traumatic thing, even when doing so is morally justified, as it often is in war.

There is one sense in which the book fails the Page 99 Test, and another in which it performs exceptionally well. The book fails the test in that page 99 invites the reader to wade deeply into subject matter that might seem out of place given the book’s topic. There is no mention here of remote warfare, of “drones,” of the US’s post-9/11 wars, or of the Predator and Reaper aircraft and their crews. Page 99 is about the distinction between post-traumatic stress disorder and moral injury—two terms that might fit more naturally in a book about psychology than one about morality. One could read page 99 and yet have no idea that this book is about the morality of remote warfare.

And yet, there is another sense in which the Page 99 Test points readers to a thread that is woven throughout the book’s other pages: if we are to understand remote warfare, we must look, not just to modern military technology and not just to the post-9/11 “global war on terror,” but to the broader context: to the long history of airpower, to two millennia of just war thinking, and to enduring features of human nature, to include moral psychology.

Even if, as Ford Madox Ford suggests, the quality of this book should be revealed on page 99 (and I’ll leave that determination to readers), the scope of the book, in this case, will not be. To engage with (notice, I do not say “to answer”) the question, is remote warfare moral, I have looked closely at the warrior ethos, at moral justifications for killing in war, at military virtue, at the history of war, and yes, of course, at moral psychology. My own view is that these questions are not simple, and their answers are not obvious. But as the age of “drones” quickly ushers us into the age of military artificial intelligence and lethal autonomous weapons systems, it is crucial that we ask them.

Visit Joseph O. Chapa's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's "A Question of Standing"

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is an Emeritus Professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh. He studied at the Universities of Wales, Michigan, Harvard, and Cambridge, and is the honorary president of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. He has held visiting fellowships and professorships in Harvard, Berlin, and Toronto. He is the author of a prize-winning book on the American left, and of sixteen other books published in eleven languages, mainly on US intelligence history, including The CIA and American Democracy (1989), The FBI: A History (2007), In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (2012), and We Know All About You (2017).

Jeffreys-Jones applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA, and reported the following:

The page discusses how President Gerald Ford responded to the great CIA scandal of the mid-1970s. It explains how he reacted to the revelation that the agency had plotted a number of assassinations. He issued an executive ban on this practice. But his motive was to prevent Congress from passing a more enduring legislative ban on assassination. Future presidents would be able to reverse his order, and he warned that the United States should never tie its own hands in a hostile world. Ford was interested in keeping certain CIA secrets from leaking. Page 99 goes on to give the example of how stories began to leak about the agency’s plan to lift a sunken Soviet submarine in order to retrieve the secret data that its equipment would reveal. The CIA commissioned the Glomar Explorer, a specialist vessel, to do the job. Ford went to some lengths to prevent the story from leaking into the public domain. All this, the paragraph explains, was part of a Ford administration counter-reformation against reforms being pressed for in Congress.

The page gives a good idea of the theme of Chapter 8 in the book, which is titled ‘From Reformation to Counter-reformation in the 1970s’. It illustrates one facet, but one facet only, of the overall theme expressed in the book’s title, A Question of Standing. The book argues that the CIA must be in good standing to do its job properly, analysing foreign threats and giving the nation’s leaders an opportunity to respond to them effectively. The CIA was the world’s first democratically approved secret intelligence service and continued to depend on the respect and support of the US public. The 1970’s revelations wrecked such confidence and reform was needed to restore trust. President Ford was a reluctant contributor to that process.

The Page 99 Test thus works up to a point in the case of A Question of Standing. It does not – and could not -- summarise the other points made in a book that covers a long period and is by definition about world history. It does not tell you about the Bay of Pigs, about the CIA’s contribution to President Reagan’s effort to end the arms race and European communism in the 1980s, and does not foretell future problems with Al Qaeda and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But surely the appeal of any book should not be monochromatic. Every page, when turned, should present you with a different little surprise. Also, while lengthy deviation can be annoying, there is room for little asides and anecdotes that enliven the story and keep the reader’s attention. Page 99 should succeed because it relates to other pages, but also because it is different from them.

Learn about Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's top ten classic spy novels.

The Page 99 Test: In Spies We Trust.

The Page 99 Test: We Know All About You.

--Marshal Zeringue

Holly Lawford-Smith's "Gender-Critical Feminism"

Holly Lawford-Smith is an Associate Professor in Political Philosophy in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She works in social, moral, and political philosophy and has focused on climate ethics, collective action, and feminism. Her last book was Not In Their Name (2019), on citizens' culpability for states' actions. Before the University of Melbourne, she worked at the University of Sheffield, the Australian National University, and Charles Sturt University. Her PhD is from the Australian National University and her undergraduate, Honours, and Masters degrees are from the University of Otago.

Lawford-Smith applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Gender-Critical Feminism, and reported the following:

"More gays, fewer gays, it doesn't matter. No one is harmed by being gay... But the idea doesn't apply to trans people as straightforwardly as Law seems to assume".

This is how page 99 starts. On the previous page, I had explained that Benjamin Law, a well-known gay Australian writer who today has nearly 150K Twitter followers, had alleged that worries about increasing numbers of trans people could only come from 'aversion to--and hatred of--the existence of transgender people'. I was explaining that this idea gets its plausibility from the comparison to gay rights movement, and conservative worries about a gay 'social contagion'. I argue that the worries are in fact very different, because no one is harmed by being gay, so it genuinely doesn't matter if there are more or fewer gays; but people arguably are harmed by identifying as trans, because of the link from trans identification to medical and surgical transition, combined with the fact that demographic changes in who is identifying as trans create a strong possibility that many people currently identifying as trans are not really trans. If we care about harm reduction, then under these circumstances we should care if there are more or fewer people identifying as trans. Most of the rest of page 99 is taken up with empirical description of the potential harms of affirming children as trans, including that they don't get support for co-morbidities that are actually playing a more significant explanatory role in their unwellness, that they are at risk of the unknown long-term effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and that had they been left alone they would have been most likely to desist in trans identification, avoiding the pain of surgical transition and the dependency of medical transition.

There's a sense in which the Page 99 Test applies extremely well to this book, because it singles out one of the two most controversial issues in the book, namely the 'affirmation-only' approach to children who identify as trans. (The other controversial issue, starting just a few pages later, is the sexual nature of the trans identification of one cohort of adult trans-identifying males.) It also gets right to the heart of that issue, which is the disagreement with gender identity activists like Benjamin Law over whether there's really "nothing to see here" when it comes to the huge demographic changes to the cohort who identify as transgender today. But there's another sense in which the Test doesn't apply well to this book, or at least is unhelpful to what I intended for the book. That is, the chapter on trans issues, which is Chapter 5 and titled 'Trans/Gender', is just one chapter of a ten-chapter book about gender-critical feminism, the emerging feminist theory and movement. One of the things I was at great pains to argue in the book is that while there is a current preoccupation with trans issues among gender-critical feminists, this is only because of the conflict of interest with women's rights created by the way that trans rights activists are currently pursuing their political goals. What explains why there's such a conflict is more fundamental feminist commitments: women are indignant about the loss of female-only spaces, female-specific rights and protections under the law, and female-centred language. They're realizing more and more that feminism itself has lost sight of its original constituency, and the reasons that justified having a feminist movement in the first place. So it was important to me that trans issues not take up too much space in the book. The Page 99 Test, counterproductively, takes us right into the heart of that conflict, and might misleadingly suggest that the book is 'about' trans issues. It isn't - most of the book is about the connection between gender-critical feminism and radical feminism, and about arguing for a particular version of feminism, one that is narrowly focused on the interests of 'women qua women', meaning, females, and the way that they have been constructed to be feminine across the several thousands of years of male-dominated history.

Visit Holly Lawford-Smith's website.

The Page 99 Test: Not In Their Name.

--Marshal Zeringue

Johanna Drucker's "Inventing the Alphabet"

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and a distinguished professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of Fulbright, Mellon, and Getty Fellowships and in 2019 was the inaugural Distinguished Senior Humanities Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Her artist books are included in museums and libraries in North America and Europe, and her creative work was the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks 1972-2012: 40 Years of Books and Projects. Her publications include Visualizing Interpretation, Iliazd: Meta-biography of a Modernist, and The Digital Humanities Coursebook.

Drucker applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present, and reported the following:

The text on page 99 falls in Chapter 4 of Inventing the Alphabet, “The Confusion of Tongues and Compendia of Scripts.” The section focuses on the 16th-century French linguist, Cabalist, and scholar, Guillaume Postel and describes the contents of Postel’s 1538 publication, Linguarum Duodecim Characteribus Differentium Alphabetum (Diverse Alphabetic Characters from Twelve Languages). In this book, Postel presented samples of twelve scripts he had collected during his travels from Paris through the regions of the Levant and Near East. The section summarizes the introduction to the twelve languages Postel’s book provided, including pronunciation guides as well as settings of the Lord’s Prayer in each of the scripts. The book was a breakthrough for several reasons. Postel had copies made of Hasmonean coins (from the 1st century of the Common Era) and also presented a specimen of Samaritan, an alphabet that was competing with Hebrew to be considered the “first” human writing. Postel’s convictions about a coming religious war and return of the Messiah guided his work. But as the text notes, he participated in major debates of the period suggesting the “oldest” of human tongues was Hebrew. He traced the differences in existing languages to the dispersal of the sons of Noah after the Flood and subsequent Confusion of Tongues at Babel.

Page 99 contains crucial elements of Inventing the Alphabet. Though an obscure reference to some, Guillaume Postel’s work exerted considerable influence in the 16th and 17th centuries when Biblical narratives served as historical explanations and mystical letterforms found their place among samples of living scripts. Postel’s efforts to assemble historical knowledge of the alphabet from evidence available to him at the time exemplifies the appreciation of living and lost intellectual traditions that inform the book as a long overview.

Inventing the Alphabet is concerned with intellectual history and with tracking the shifting frameworks of scholarship according to which the origins of the alphabet have been understood. For Postel, the Cabalist, the notion of a divine origin of the letters from the stars was fully justified. Other early scholars, notably the Greek historian Herodotus, had only textual means to describe their understanding. Lacking any visual record, we can only speculate on what Herodotus had been seeing when he described the earliest inscriptions in letters brought from the East. The book traces the relations between knowledge technologies—texts, images, compendia, tables, epigraphy, and archaeology—and the shifting concept of alphabet origins and development. For instance, while biblical timelines are no longer used to define historical understanding of the geological and archaeological record, the work of Herodotus continues to be useful for assessing the age and variety of archaic Greek scripts. Likewise, the discoveries of ancient inscriptions in the Near East, lands featured in biblical accounts, have provided some evidence of the historical accuracy (however qualified) of events narrated in the Old Testament.

Page 99 touches on all of these issues. While some intellectual positions have fallen out of favor—such as Postel’s Cabalistic belief in the celestial origin of the alphabet—they were fully legitimate within their own historical moment. As new evidence and empirical models of studying the past have emerged, we need to remember that they, too, are shaped on assumptions that may be subject to change. We can now map the development of all alphabetic scripts in use today (Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Berber, Tamil etc.) emerged from a single proto-Canaanite tap root between about 1800-1500 BCE in the ancient Levant. Most remarkably, that set of alphabetic signs invented by nomadic Semitic speakers in the deserts of Canaan and Sinai undergirds our current international Internet communication systems.

Visit Johanna Drucker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mahmood Monshipouri's "In the Shadow of Mistrust"

Mahmood Monshipouri is Professor and Chair of International Relations at San Francisco State University; he also teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include the edited volume Inside the Islamic Republic: Social Change in Post-Khomeini Iran.

Monshipouri applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, In the Shadow of Mistrust: The Geopolitics and Diplomacy of US-Iran Relations, and reported the following:

Yes, the book’s page 99 has an appropriate title for this book’s central gist. Iran has continuously navigated between ideological and geopolitical spheres. The following quotation from page 99 is appropriate:

The 1980s saw the formation of an elite revolutionary military force. Iraq’s invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980, not only failed to dissuade the Iranians from pursuing their revolutionary goals but also led them to double down on these efforts. Ironically, it was in the midst of that war that the Iranian revolutionaries came up with the idea of forming the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and tasking it with “liberating” Palestine and exporting the revolution beyond Iran’s borders.

Although page 99 is one of the book’s most relevant pages, signifying to some extent the essence of the book, other pages, such as 189 and 247, also best reflect the book’s main thrust.

The test works somewhat (not entirely) accurately for the book’s central theme. But focusing largely on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and its support of proxies in the region (such as Hezbollah) might not provide the most accurate picture of Iran’s foreign policy toward such regions as the South Caucasus or the so-called “Look to the East” foreign policy that relates to Iran’s long-term investment in its relations with China.

Learn more about In the Shadow of Mistrust at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue