Brian Balogh's "Not in My Backyard"

Brian Balogh is professor of history emeritus at the University of Virginia. He was cohost of the popular public radio show, then podcast, Backstory with the American History Guys. He lives in Cleveland Heights, OH.

Balogh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Not in My Backyard: How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Not in My Back Yard passed the test with flying colors, even though the words covered only one third of that page. That’s because it’s the last page of chapter 9. The first short paragraph describes how the story’s petite protagonist, Rae Ely, returned home and was confronted by her husband and a former football player-turned realtor. They demanded that she sell the family home – she better sign the papers immediately if she knew what was good for her. “Unfortunately for them,” Rae concluded, “I had found my voice. They were a couple of years too late. And I did understand that the property was in my name.”

As the second paragraph explains, Rae used her voice in a wide range of venues. Just a few years earlier, when the governor of Virginia announced that he planned to build a prison across the road, Rae asked her husband what he planned to do about it. Now thirty, gaining confidence in herself, her rights as a woman, and as a citizen, Rae was doing more telling than asking.

Readers who begin with these two paragraphs might easily grasp that Rae Ely, like millions of women in America in the 1970s, had begun to claim her rights at home and in the public arena. Readers might sense that protecting her home might propel Rae into public life. Readers could not know from these two paragraphs that Hiram Ely’s desire to sell the house was directly motivated by Rae’s emergence as the leader of the prison opposition. But they would not be surprised to learn that Rae’s public engagement strained the Elys relationship to the breaking point. As Hiram would soon tell Rae, “When I married you, I wanted a wife, not an environmentalist. A wife has enough to do to look after her husband’s needs and those of the family.”

Would readers know that Rae Ely eventually graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law even though she did not have an undergraduate degree? Would they suspect that after defeating a powerful governor in what became known as “Holton’s Vietnam,” she took on Fortune Five Hundred W.R. Grace & Co. that wanted to strip mine near her home? Could they possibly suspect that after battling for 25 years, Ely convinced Peter Grace to donate thousands of mineral-laden acres to the citizens’ group Rae led for decades? From two paragraphs, might they imagine that Ely founded the first National Historic Landmark that encompassed thousands of acres of rural America? No.

Nevertheless, reading page 99 might make readers wonder how Rae Ely found her voice, and what she accomplished by raising it at home and in public.

Learn more about Not in My Backyard at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams's "New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century"

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is Professor of English in the School for Graduate Studies at the State University of New York, Empire State. She is the author of cMary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual and editor of Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers and Literature of New York. She is founder and cochair of the Mary McCarthy Society and Associate Editor of Studies in American Humor.

Fuchs Abrams applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century shows how female humorists use satire and irony as an indirect form of social protest in questioning traditional gender roles in American society. In particular, I look at American women writers in the interwar period who were on the periphery of male-dominated New York intellectual circles, including Edna St. Vincent Millay among the Greenwich Village writers, Dorothy Parker among the Algonquin wits, Tess Slesinger and the Menorah Journal group, Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance writers, Dawn Powell and the Lafayette circle, and Mary McCarthy among the Partisan Review crowd.

Page 99 brings us to chapter 3: “Tess Slesinger, the Menorah Journal Group, and the Feminist Socialist Satire of 1930s America.” In it, I show how Slesinger’s 1934 novel, The Unpossessed, satirizes the failure of New York intellectuals to put their ideas into action and their inability to engage in matters of the heart due to an over reliance on matters of the head. She further explores the conflicted identity of the woman intellectual, in this case the autobiographically-based Margaret Flinders, who is shamed by her Marxist husband for wanting to engage in the “bourgeois” act of having a family. Like her character, Tess Slesinger was pressured by her then husband, leftist intellectual Herbert Solow, to have an abortion, which became the basis of one of the first works of fiction to address the controversial subject of abortion. Slesinger uses modernist techniques of stream of consciousness and multiple narration to explore the identity of another female character, Elizabeth Leonard, the sexually liberated New Woman who defies traditional expectations of marriage and motherhood in her embrace of physical and intellectual freedom.

On page 99, I discuss how Slesinger uses satire to expose the leftist male intellectual’s lack of feeling and the modern woman’s struggle to assert her multiple identities:

In Slesinger’s use of gendered language and her differentiation of traditional gender roles, she is considered by some critics to be “conservative.” However, her presentation of the conflicted identity of the modern woman and the validity of multiple expressions of gender identity—from wife and mother to free lover and independent intellectual—anticipate more contemporary modes of feminism moving beyond a single definition of womanhood. For Margaret, like Slesinger, being a modern woman of intellect does not necessitate a refusal of life, of maternal instincts, and the possibility of domestic happiness. By forcing an opposition between thinking and feeling, between art and life, Slesinger implies through her satiric lens that the 1930s leftist intellectual is relegated to an “unpossessed” life without living.

On page 99, I also raise the important issue of the resistance to women’s humor by predominantly male critics and the double bind that many female humorists face for being seen as too serious in their social critique and not serious enough in their treatment of “domestic” subjects of love, marriage, and motherhood. On page 99, we see how Murray Kempton among others considered Slesinger’s novel a failed document of political realism based on the radical intellectuals of the Menorah Journal in the 1930s. As literary critic Lionel Trilling pointed out in defense of Slesinger, the novel was not intended as a roman a clef but instead used historical realities to draw a broader social satire. Mary McCarthy made a similar defense against those who attacked her social satire of radical idealists of the 1940s in The Oasis observing: “What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” It was not until the women’s movement of the 1970s that critics were able to appreciate the blending of the personal with the political by these authors in what can be seen not as failed works of social realism but as successful works of feminist socialist satire.

The Page 99 Test is a success in that it offers a window through the works of Tess Slesinger into the book’s larger structure, showing how humor is used by twentieth century female satirists to partially dismantle what Audre Lorde terms “the master’s house.”

Learn more about New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miles P. Grier's "Inkface"

Miles P. Grier is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Inkface marks the final turn in a chapter that positions Aphra Behn's novella "Oroonoko" (1688) as a proto-feminist query. I infer that Behn wrote “Oroonoko” to discover whether the stage tragedy of Othello could be revised in print, by a self-respecting woman writer, to allow Desdemona to triumph even as she is murdered by her husband. In the preceding pages, I pursue this question by looking at the white narrator and the black African heroine as two Desdemona figures who achieve disparate victories. The white narrator survives because, unlike Desdemona, she avoids the fatal stain that results from coupling with a blackamoor. Ironically, the African queen Imoinda achieves sexual inviolability — she cannot be deflowered — because she has already been covered in black floral tattoos.

Scholars of Behn’s novella have suggested that Behn finds Imoinda a rival and has her murdered to secure victory over her Black double. Yet, on page 99, I argue that critiques of Behn's failed sympathy with Imoinda neglect that an old African woman, Onahal, is an earlier cipher for the white author.

I write:

Arguably, the elderly Onahal, who facilitates the consummation of Oroonoko and Imoinda’s sworn love in Coromantien, is a stand-in for the aged writer. Onahal, she writes “had not forgot how pleasant it was to be in Love: And though she had some Decays in her Face, she had none in her Sence and Wit; she was there agreeable still” (139). An idealized version of the authorial Behn, Onahal is a spy and mediator, a clever woman who, with well-maintained beauty and court connections, can still seduce and wield influence.

…. In her navigation of the embitterment and gendered service that accompany her status as the cast-off mistress of the Coromantien king, Onahal proves herself an African composite of Emilia and Iago. Like Desdemona’s maid, Onahal controls access to the “Bed of State” she once occupied, where the king intends to consummate a marriage he is imposing on Imoinda, in spite of her prior betrothal to Oroonoko (138). She resembles Iago in avenging her loss of status by pretending to do others’ service—operating within the letter of decrees while employing an unruly orality. Yet, where Iago famously fabricates a scene in which his bedmate Cassio confesses in his sleep to a clandestine affair with Desdemona (III.iv.413– 26), Onahal reveals to Behn’s African prince that he should “not lose a Moment in Jealousie” of a king she “kn[o]w[s]” is impotent (138). Beyond disclosing this secret truth, she ensures that Oroonoko and Imoinda have time and privacy to have a sexual union that, though consensual, cannot achieve legitimacy. For her pains, Onahal is sold into slavery but not to Surinam, it would appear, as she is never heard from again.

The chapter concludes on the next page with a sentence in which I aim to capture Behn's regrets about the result of her experiment:

As the author Behn looked at the results of her experiment—a lifelike death mask, a shattered statue, a literary commodity, and a treacherous version of herself—Onahal suggests the faint wish that it could have gone another way.

A reader assessing my book according to page 99 could be misled, as the whole book is not a reading of "Oroonoko." Still, the excerpt does exemplify my contention that attending to the messy materials of early blackface Othellos puts both Othello and its respondents in a radically different light than we have imagined. Behn, an archetypal First World feminist, turns out not to betray an African counterpart.

A person skimming page 99 would likely turn to the final fragment on 100 and catch the vague wistfulness attending Behn’s achievement of social authority. Through skillful deployment of printed characters and ink-marked Africans, Behn legitimizes herself as a woman writer in a sexist cultural field. Yet, joining the fraternity of literate white men comes at a significant cost that she acknowledges, as I believe we must, too, if we intend to rectify the real injuries that she contemplates in fiction.

Learn more about Inkface at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele's "Flowers, Guns, and Money"

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele is the author of Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776-1848. She is the Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio. She is also a book reviews editor for the Journal of the Early Republic and the coordinator for The Ohio Seminar in Early American History and Culture.

Schakenbach Regele applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism, and reported the following:

From page 99:

investments (Trinity Land Company offered him $10 million to secure the cession of Texas to the United States), the Galveston Company preferred that Texas remain Mexican. They commissioned General José Antonio Mexía, secretary of the Legation of Mexico in Washington, to lobby for the removal of the provision of the 1830 law that prohibited U.S. citizens from settling along the border. Soon after the ban on U.S. immigrants was lifted in 1834, the General Land Office of Texas closed without the Company having received its premium land for settling the requisite number of families. The Company, however, continued to profit from land development, and decades later, they received a claims settlement from the United States and Mexican Claims Commission. They were also instrumental in the development of independent Texas.

Despite early setbacks in Texas-Coahuila, there was much potential profit for those willing and able to hold out, and for those with connections. In addition to Poinsett’s involvement in the mining companies and the Galveston Bay Company, he managed Richard Exter’s estate after his death in June, 1829. Exter had received two empresario grants in northwestern Texas with Stephen Julian Wilson, a North Carolina native who became a naturalized Mexican citizen. The two requested a fur trading monopoly from the Mexican government on the grounds that most fur trappers from the U.S. and Great Britain deprived the government of significant tax revenue by hunting in Mexico and selling elsewhere; Exter and Wilson conversely would employ Mexican citizens and pay Mexican taxes. The government quickly rescinded their license, but the partners retained their land. When Exter died, his land passed to his widow, María Dolores Soto y Saldaña. Several months after Exter’s death, she married John Charles Beales, a British doctor and land speculator, who sought Poinsett’s help in administering the land. He wanted Poinsett to take charge of settling the land so that his company would be able to claim their prize land before the contract expired. Beales also needed help asserting his right to the grant over Dennis A. Smith, Poinsett’s associate in the mining venture, who had entered a purchase agreement with Exter in 1827. Shortly before Exter’s death,Smith organized a $400,000 company to develop the land. Beales argued that Smith’s claim to, and investors shares in, Exter’s land was illegitimate because it violated the 1830 colonization law. Exter’s brothers wanted Poinsett to ensure that Exter’s widow and child secured profits from the land.

Poinsett attempted to represent all his interested constituents by recommending New York Congressman Churchill C. Cambreleng, who owned stock in Smith’s Tlacotal Mining Company, to oversee the ad-
[footnotes omitted]

Page 99 comes toward the end of the fourth of nine chapters and places the reader in Mexico in the second half of the 1820s, when Poinsett served as the United States’ first minister plenipotentiary to newly independent Mexico. In many ways, this chapter is the heart of the book because it centers on the aspect of Poinsett’s career that he was most known for. The chapter explores official U.S. diplomacy in Mexico in the context of “interest.” Although historians generally agree that the value placed on “disinterest,” or impartiality, in politics faded away by the early 1800s--replaced by a tacit acknowledgement that self-interest could and should be compatible with national interest--Poinsett and his peers continued to tout traditional understandings of disinterest. In practice, however, he manipulated his political power for private gains. For example, he became involved in freemasonry in Mexico, used the political connections he gained to establish a US-based mining company, and then misrepresented the profitability of the mines to investors.

Readers might be confused if they only saw page 99 because it discusses a web of financial connections around land and says nothing about patriotism, which is in the book’s title. At the top of the page, I am making the point that not all U.S. investors in Texas wanted annexation. The sentence starts on the previous page and uses Poinsett’s diplomatic successor Anthony Butler as a comparison, highlighting the fact that individual diplomats made different decisions based on their own interests. Although this page says nothing about patriotism, it illustrates a larger argument of the book, which is that Poinsett personified a type of patriotism that emerged following the American Revolution, one in which statesmen served the nation by serving themselves, securing economic prosperity, and military security while often prioritizing their own ambitions and financial interests. In that sense, the Page 99 Test works.

Yet if browsers opened to this page, they would get very little sense of Poinsett’s multi-decade career or his personal life—the fact that he did not marry until age 54, and before he was married, he had a son with an unnamed woman who died in childbirth (Poinsett’s earlier biographers either ignored or did not know about this woman and child). I would want readers to know, for example, that Poinsett had, prior to his time in Mexico, served as a secret agent in South America, and would later, as secretary of war, oversee the genocide of the Trail of Tears, before helping establish the Smithsonian Institute. His life, like the history of the nation he served, was paradoxical.

Learn more about Flowers, Guns, and Money at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

María L. Cruz-Torres's "Pink Gold"

María L. Cruz-Torres is an anthropologist and associate professor at Arizona State University's School of Transborder Studies. She is a coeditor of Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America and the author of Lives of Dust and Water: An Anthropology of Change and Resistance in Northwestern Mexico.

Cruz-Torres applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Pink Gold: Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico, and reported the following:

Page 99 introduces us to the complex and highly competitive work that women shrimp traders in Mexico perform. When the reader opens the book on page 99, the first encounter is a photograph of a woman dressed in a long shirt and a skirt pulling a plastic bucket on top of a folding wheeled cart along a street. Zoraida or Doña Zory (not her real name) is a shrimp vendor who lives in a rural community near Mazatlán. I first met her one late morning in the summer of 2009 at the Mazatlán’s shrimp market while she was buying shrimp from another vendor I knew. She came to the market that day, as she often did, to buy the shrimp that she was going to sell that day. The woman shrimp vendor who introduced us, explained to me that Zoraida was a cubetera, or a woman who sells shrimp from a bucket walking from door to door along the streets of the middle-class colonias or neighborhoods in Mazatlán City. Shrimp vendors like her, in contrast to those who sell from stands at the shrimp market, lack a permanent space to work. That day, after I explained to her my intention of writing a book about women shrimp traders, she invited me to accompany her, so I could experience it first-hand. We departed the shrimp market that muggy morning heading towards one of the colonias, not too far from the shrimp market. It took us about 20 minutes to reach the main street of the colonia, walking under the already hot sun to begin the long hours of sweating and selling. What impressed me the most about Zoraida was not just her indefatigable energy but her optimism, even in the face of uncertainty. Even when people refused to buy her shrimp she asked me not to lose hope since she was certain that someone eventually would buy it. The text below the photograph is a continuation of the previous page with the subheading “Zoraida Santana, A Cubetera.” It describes Zoraida’s routine, the tools she uses to carry and sell her shrimp, and how she advertises her product.

Page 99 provides readers with a good example of some of the key themes that the book addresses in regards to women’s role in Mexico’s seafood industry. Readers will get a glimpse of women’s struggles to pursue a decent and independent livelihood in the midst of economic, social, political, and environmental uncertainty. Thus, the Page 99 Test works partially for Pink Gold: Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico, since it explains a category of work, among others, that many women perform as shrimp traders. But the emphasis of the book is to better understand how many women who began their work as cubeteras selling shrimp in the streets of their home communities eventually made their journey to Mazatlán where after many years of political and social struggles they were finally able to organize a labor union, gained access to public space, and developed their own street shrimp market. My book also details the processes and various mechanisms that women utilized to craft their unique livelihoods within the traditionally male-dominated fishing industry. Based on long-term anthropological research of 16 years, including archival historical research, oral interviews, and participant observation, my book is an ethnography and theoretical treatment of the manner in which women in Northwestern Mexico pursue their daily livelihoods as informal shrimp traders. It traces their history of struggle from a stigmatized and marginalized group of women to their rise and recognition as icons of the local popular culture.

The book begins with an introduction to the city of Mazatlán, “the shrimp capital of the world,” in Northwestern Mexico and its dynamic and unique beachfront promenade or malecón. Then it transports us to one of the main streets in the old town section to meet a group of women locally called changueras, to learn about their struggles and efforts to organize politically so they could gain legal access to the marketing of shrimp and the use of public space in one of the busiest streets of Mazatlán. We learn about their labor union and their shrimp market and how both shape their daily lives. We get insights into their social relations inside and outside of their market, their struggle to balance work with family and household obligations, and about their performance and portrayal in various forms of expression of the local and regional popular culture. Overall, Pink Gold: Women; Shrimp, and Work in Mexico provides the reader with a first-hand account of women’s work as shrimp traders and of the role of shrimp, one of the most valuable natural resources in Mexico, regarded as “pink gold” not just because of its economic value, but also because of its contribution to the local gastronomy and food culture of the region and as a crucial cultural reference of many dimensions.

Learn more about Pink Gold at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emma Bridges's "Warriors' Wives"

Emma Bridges was educated at a comprehensive school and state sixth-form college in North East England before studying Classics at the Universities of Oxford and Durham. She is now a Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor in Classical Studies at The Open University, UK.

Bridges applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Warriors' Wives: Ancient Greek Myth and Modern Experience, and reported the following:

Open my book to page 99 and you’ll find a discussion of the mythical figure of Penelope, who in Homer’s Odyssey waits faithfully at home while her husband Odysseus, king of Ithaca, is away fighting the Trojan War for ten years, and then taking a further ten years to make his way home. Not knowing whether Odysseus is alive or dead, Penelope has to figure out not only how to manage the royal household and the estate he has left behind while parenting the son who was a baby when he left, but also to fend off the 108 suitors who have set up camp in the palace in hope that she will choose one of them to marry. In a starkly patriarchal society this is not just about another man taking Odysseus’ place in Penelope’s bed but also about taking control of his material wealth and power. Penelope’s ruse to delay having to remarry involves a typically (for ancient Greek society) feminine activity. She tells the suitors that she will choose which of them to marry only when she has finished weaving a shroud for her father in law. What they don’t know, however, is that she secretly unpicks the weaving every night.

The Page 99 Test does a reasonable job of capturing some of the key themes of Warriors’ Wives. Penelope is the archetypal ‘waiting wife’ who symbolizes some of the ideal attributes which are projected on to military spouses in both ancient Greek myth and the modern world – she is patient, faithful, and resourceful, keeping the ‘home fires burning’ while her husband is away. She is very much the ‘modal military wife’, a stereotype that persists even today in service of the largely patriarchal structures which military institutions still perpetuate. Not only that, but Penelope is also periodically silenced; although her actions are just as heroic as those of Odysseus, her story is given far less space. This mirrors the lack of attention which is still paid by policy makers, the media, and the wider public, to the experiences of military spouses. The focus of my book as whole is on unearthing those experiences, and on comparing the ways in which the wives of warriors are represented in ancient mythical narratives with aspects of the lives of those who are ‘married to the military’ in the modern world.

That said, there are elements of the experiences of soldiers’ spouses which Penelope’s story does not capture, and which I deal with elsewhere in the book. For example, I use the figure of Andromache – widow of the Trojan Hector – to explore the emotions connected with wartime farewells, as well as the devastating consequences of a soldier’s death in battle. Meanwhile the mythical Clytemnestra personifies some of the anxieties surrounding spousal infidelity in military communities, as well as symbolising the sacrifices which soldiers’ spouses have always been expected to make. Finally the story of the war captive and sexual violence survivor Tecmessa, who lives with a wounded and suicidal warrior, helps us to think about the traumatic aftermath of war for women.

Learn more about Warriors' Wives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Grant Ennis's "Dark PR"

Grant Ennis is the author of Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment. He has more than 20 years’ experience in international humanitarian affairs, environmental policy, and public health. Ennis is a distinguished alumnus of both the University of the Pacific and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment is a matrix entitled “The Information Environment ≠ The Material Environment.” The matrix [below left, click to enlarge] explains that while changing the information doesn't change behavior, changing the tangible material environment does. The matrix breaks down the factors that shape the material environment into three categories: Price, Distance, and Time. For instance, to improve our food environment we can organize and call for political action to end subsidies for, or tax unhealthy foods -- increasing their price.

Browsers opening page 99 would get a great idea of Dark PR. Page 99 is the source code of the entire book. The idea that the “information environment” is not the same as the “material environment” was the underlying inspiration for writing Dark PR. Large corporations undertake enormous effort to distract citizen movements from policies that impact the “material environment” such as soda taxes (price), junk food bans at schools (distance), and bans on the sale of harmful products like cigarettes or junk food to kids (time/age), as I mention on page 99, in favor of “information environment” policies such as nutrition education, warning labels, or “don’t eat junk food” media campaigns. We know, and as I document in Dark PR, that these informationist approaches don’t work, and that even exposure to messaging about these kinds of interventions actually decreases overall political will for materialist policy action. Page 99 is a straightforward diagram that delivers the core message.

I kept theoretical jargon to a minimum in Dark PR in order to avoid “Double Mumbo Jumbo,” -- having too many big ideas confusing my key message. Page 99 was me softly breaking that rule. Since it's a diagram, I said to myself, “people interested will like it, and those not interested will just read on.”

Page 99 touches on the famous sociological debate between Weber’s idealism (i.e. the information environment) and Marx’s materialism (i.e. the material environment). The underlying logic behind information environment efforts stems from the ideas of Weber, and yet, unlike a century ago, we now have clear evidence that interventions based on idealism (i.e. labels, education, mass communication, etc) simply don’t change behavior. We also have very clear evidence that materialist interventions (taxes, location-based bans, age restrictions, etc) are hugely effective. I take pride in this page, as my materialist theoretical framework of Price, Distance, and Time (or Price, Proximity, and Temporality as I more often call it now), being core to the solution I propose in the book, is clearly laid out in a way I didn’t have the opportunity to do elsewhere in the manuscript.

I was recently in conversation with Dr. Norah Campbell from Trinity College Dublin who mentioned that she felt that the most important of the three (i.e. Price, Distance, & Time) was time, as, if the bar is closed - no one can drink. She noted that “the alcohol lobby is far more intent in extending the opening hours of licensed premises” than they care about the other factors. That definitely sounds reasonable. I think that each of the three has a weighting that can be expressed algebraically. I imagine this similarly to how loss aversion research shows that a loss is weighted twice the value of a gain. However, I’ve yet to come to a final conclusion as to the weighting. My hunch is that price (E) might be equal to distance (M) multiplied by time (C) squared, but that’s mostly because I like the parallel with E=mc2.

Learn more about Dark PR at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric M. Patashnik's "Countermobilization"

Eric M. Patashnik is the Julis-Rabinowitz Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Brown University. He is the author or editor of several books, including Reforms at Risk.

Patashnik applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age, and reported the following:

Page 99 provides a nice illustration of one of the central themes of the book: In modern American democracy, backlashes often occur when ordinary citizens see policy reforms as a threat to their interests, values, and the institutions to which they are strongly attached. Page 99 drops the reader in the middle of a detailed case study of the ferocious backlash against the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare). The backlash played out in multiple arenas, including Congress, state legislatures, and the Supreme Court. Page 99 discusses three public constituencies that participated in voter backlashes and grassroots protests against the law: working-class Americans who earned too much to be eligible for Medicaid and resented that other people were getting more assistance than they were; Republicans who were much less supportive of Obamacare than Democrats on both partisan and ideological grounds; and senior citizens who feared that the creation of an expensive new health care entitlement would threaten Medicare, an institution on which they relied for their financial security.

While page 99 captures a key theme of my argument, it does not provide an accurate sense of the book’s scope. The book identifies and analyzes a wide range of backlashes that have convulsed American political life since the 1960s, from the backlash against civil rights laws in the 1960s, to the backlash of social conservatives against Roe v. Wade in the 1970s and 1980s, to the backlash against the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s, to the backlashes against education reform, government surveillance, and gay rights in the 2000s. The book explains the conditions under which the mass public or organized groups are likely to rise up against enacted policies—and offers practical lessons to help identify and navigate backlash risks.

Learn more about Countermobilization at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philip C. Almond's "The Buddha"

Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in Religious Thought at the University of Queensland and a renowned specialist in the nexus between religion and the history of ideas. His recent publications include Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (2022), The Antichrist: A New Biography (2020), God: A New Biography (2018); Afterlife: A History of Life after Death (2016), and The Devil: A New Biography (2014). His earlier, pioneering book The British Discovery of Buddhism (1988) has gained a reputation as a landmark study in comparative religion and intellectual history.

Almond applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West, and reported the following:

Page 99 gives an account of the Greek historian Megasthenes’s encounter with the ‘Sarmanes’, one of the two groups of Indian Philosophers that he encountered while he was at the court of the Indian king Chandragupta around 300 BCE. Was this one of the first encounters of the West with the followers of the Buddha? Well, perhaps! Page 99 indicates the way in which, from the time of Alexander the Great until the nineteenth century, the story of the Buddha came to the West in a series of glimpses and hints, of occasional insights along with many false trails – of the Buddha as an incarnation of the god Vishnu, as the equivalent of the Old Testament Noah, as an African deity, or as the Eastern equivalent of the gods Mercury, Wod, and Oden.

So, this is a book about the fourth century BCE founder of Buddhism, Gautama, and how his life was imagined both in the East and the West. It shows how the enchanted mythological figure of the Buddha in the ancient East became the disenchanted historical Buddha of the modern West.

We begin with two chapters that give an account of the life of the Buddha constructed from the earliest Eastern biographies of the Buddha. The next five chapters explore how the West came to its current understanding of the life of the Buddha and the religion that he founded, beginning with ‘the naked philosophers’ of India that Alexander the Great’s expedition encountered, and then on to the medieval encounters of Marco Polo and other travellers to the courts of the Mongols. The next chapter deals with the little-known story of how the Buddha became a saint in the Eastern and Western churches by the end of the first millennium, followed by the ‘discovery’ of the Buddha during the ‘age of discovery’ when accounts from Catholic missionaries in China and Japan began to reach the West.

The last two chapters deal with the discovery of Buddhism in the modern West when the textual traditions of Buddhism began to arrive in the West. In the nineteenth century, ‘Buddhism’ became recognised for the first time as a world religion alongside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The final chapter shows how the Buddha became one of the ‘great men of history’ – the Light of Asia, the Indian Luther, the philosopher of a new form of rational philosophy, a very human figure, neither God nor superman. It demonstrates how a new form of ‘naturalised Buddhism’ has become available to the modern Westerner.

Thus, this book aspires to tell the story of how a human life devoted to finding the solution to the problem of human suffering in ancient India and to teaching others the path to freedom from it can prove just as inspiring in the modern West as in the ancient East.

Learn more about The Buddha at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Afterlife: A History of Life after Death.

The Page 99 Test: The Antichrist: A New Biography.

The Page 99 Test: Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dana Lloyd's "Land Is Kin"

Dana Lloyd is assistant professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, and reported the following:

Land Is Kin offers five conceptions of land at play in legal cases about Native American sacred sites. Page 99 falls in the chapter about land as sacred, in a section where I survey past cases about Native American sacred sites. The point of the book is that seeing land as sacred is not enough, that courts tend to pit against each other ideas about land as sacred and about land as property as mutually exclusive, when, in fact, land means much more than that. And so, in a way, if you only read page 99 of Land Is Kin you might get the wrong idea about this book and my argument in it.

However, one sentence in the middle of page 99 does capture an important aspect of what I argue in the book as a whole: “Without acknowledgment of the colonial, genocidal history of the place in question, religion is doomed to be depoliticized and indigeneity essentialized.” Even if we think of a place primarily as sacred, we need to remember that its sacredness to Indigenous peoples has led to violence, and that protecting it today must include protection of Indigenous peoples from such violence.

The other ideas about land that appear in Land Is Kin center around home, wilderness, and kinship. I read trial testimonies and evidence, Supreme Court decisions, and legislation—both federal and tribal—protecting Indigenous lands. While Native American sacred sites cases are usually argued and decided as cases about religious freedom (the right of Indigenous nations to use places sacred to them for worship), I argue that these cases are actually about Indigenous sovereignty (that these places are not just sacred to Indigenous nations, that these places are their homelands and their kin).

What I say on page 99 is that even if cases about Native American sacred sites are decided as cases about religious freedom, judges should still take into account the settler colonial context of these cases. But the book’s journey takes us away from settler law and into Indigenous law (specifically, the Yurok Tribal Court) as a site where Indigenous sovereignty is enacted—where sacred land is protected as kin.

Learn more about Land Is Kin at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue