Jeremi Suri's "Henry Kissinger and the American Century"

Jeremi Suri is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. His publications include The Global Revolutions of 1968 and Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Henry Kissinger and the American Century, and reported the following:

I will begin by quoting the first sentences on page 99 of Henry Kissinger and the American Century:

"If he were not a German Jew, Kissinger would have lived a very different life. His experiences reflected the intersection of the Cold War and Jewish mobility in the post-1945 world."

Everyone has an opinion about Kissinger's policies, but few people have examined how he made his career. My book shows that Kissinger was not a strategic genius or an amoral elitist, but instead a product of his times. Kissinger's policies reflected his pessimism about democracy, born of his experiences as a German-Jew in Nazi Germany. As an immigrant to the United States, he believed that only strong state power could assure security, mobility, and comfort for "ordinary" citizens. He became an influential policy adviser by drawing on his European intellectual networks and crafting practical policy alternatives for leaders -- like John Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and now George W. Bush -- who sought to assure American international power without full-scale war. Kissinger's career reflected the dominant trends in politics, society, and culture from the 1930s to the present. He is not exceptional. He is one of us.

Learn more about Henry Kissinger and the American Century, and read an excerpt, at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Taylor's "The Haunting of Cambria"

Richard Taylor is or has been a "U.S. Army military intelligence analyst; Vietnam vet; screenwriter; short story writer; Hollywood studio historian; corporate in-house magazine publisher and editor-in-chief; Chief of Security of Warner Hollywood Studios for nearly 15 years" -- and the author of The Haunting of Cambria, to which he applied the "Page 99 Test" and reported the following:

In The Haunting of Cambria, Theo Parker has suffered a devastating loss, the death of his bride in a car accident the day of their marriage and purchase of a bed and breakfast. When he is released after a six-week coma and months of rehab, he has nowhere else to go but the B&B, where he meets dowdy Eleanor Glacy, the property manager. They experience what may only be described as a haunting. Is it Theo's dead wife, Lily's ghost? Or is there something far more ominous at work? As Theo and Eleanor drift toward a relationship, he attends her brother's wedding where he purposely refutes the family belief that Eleanor is a lesbian. ("Don't ask!" Eleanor says, but of course Theo must.) This brings us to Page 99, where Eleanor and Theo make good their escape from the rehearsal dinner only to be waylaid by Eleanor's mother, whose ecstatic response to her daughter being "normal" embarrasses and angers retiring Eleanor even more.

Does this page epitomize the book? Well, the humor does, I suppose, and the fact that hidden things are eventually revealed, a subtext of the novel. But, generally, no. The Haunting of Cambria begins as a haunted house tale and then takes a turn toward something entirely new and horrifying. With some humor and, as Sullivan of Sullivan's Travels would say, "... a little sex."

The following is Page 99 of The Haunting of Cambria:

When we were in Eleanor’s pickup, she backed up over the parking bumper that held the trash dumpster in place, slammed the gearshift into drive and squealed out of the parking lot. “I take it,” she said, “you don’t want to sleep with half a dozen men in my father’s den?” she asked.

“How do you mean that?” I asked.

“I told them we would be more comfortable in a motel, which you’re paying for,” she replied. “I told them—“

But suddenly there was Ella, standing in front of the pickup and beside their family car. Eleanor stopped, and I rolled the passenger window down. “Don’t forget your fitting,” she told Eleanor. “It’s at nine.”

“I’ll be there,” Eleanor said. “Roll the window up, Theo.”

“Theo?” Ella asked.

“Parker’s his last name. His real first name is Theo.”

“Actually, I prefer Parker,” I said.

“Theo! That’s a darling name!” Ella exclaimed (really, exclaimed).

“Roll the window up, Theo,” Eleanor said. “We’re going now.”

I rolled the window up. Eleanor put the truck in gear.

“You didn’t have to get nasty,” I said.

Eleanor looked at me for an instant with an expression that said, You are at this moment the most vile human being on the face of the earth.

I paid for two motel rooms with an adjoining door. Eleanor’s side was locked. I knocked but gave up after awhile, turned on the TV and raided the honor bar for Toblerone chocolate and some pretzels. She came in around ten-thirty and sat on my bed. She was wearing her nightgown now, short, filmy, flippy-floppy, she didn’t care — it was as if I had become one of her gay friends, had she actually made any male gay friends.

“Give me chocolate,” she ordered and I tossed what remained of the Toblerone at her.

“Look at it this way,” I said. “Your parents don’t think you’re gay anymore. You’re not gay, so that’s a good thing, right?”

Visit Richard Taylor's website and read an excerpt from The Haunting of Cambria.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Miller's "Native America, Discovered and Conquered"

Robert J. Miller is Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" and the "Page 69 Test" to his book Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book gives an example synopsis of the thesis of my book in regards the Lewis & Clark expedition. My book is about how the international law Doctrine of Discovery was used by Euro-Americans in what is now the United States to take property, commercial, diplomatic and human rights from the indigenous people.

On page 99, which is the first page of my fifth chapter, I introduce how Lewis & Clark and President Thomas Jefferson used the Doctrine of Discovery to claim the Pacific Northwest for the United States and to claim property, commercial, diplomatic and human rights against the native people of the Louisiana Territory and the Oregon Country.

Page 69 of my book is also an excellent place to start reviewing my book. On that page, in my third chapter, I explain that President Jefferson purchased the Doctrine of Discovery power from France when he entered the Louisiana Treaty and how he used the principles of Discovery against the native peoples there.

Read a description of Native America, Discovered and Conquered and visit the book's blog; see Robert Miller's faculty website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Zoellner's "The Heartless Stone"

Tom Zoellner has worked as a contributing editor for Men's Health magazine and as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the co-author of An Ordinary Man, the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, whose actions during the 1994 Rwandan genocide were portrayed in the movie Hotel Rwanda, and The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Heartless Stone and reported the following:

Page 99 of the paperback version of The Heartless Stone contains a description of the fabled "sight rooms" of the De Beers selling office at 17 Charterhouse Street in London. The book is an investigation into the global diamond trade, ala Fast Food Nation. One of the titans of the business, of course, is De Beers and the book spends two chapters dissecting its history and operations. The Ford rule does seem to provide a distillation of two key themes -- 1) the banality of the diamond myth and 2) the false image of geological rarity that keeps a hefty price tag attached to that myth. I might have picked a different page to highlight, given a choice, but 99 works just fine as a sip from the bottle. Here it is:

“Keeping the balance was everything,” said this official, who asked that I keep him anonymous. “We would check the price of rough in Bombay, Antwerp, Tel Aviv and New York. We knew whatever we did would have a huge effect on the marketplace.”

Outsiders usually aren’t permitted on the sight floor, which represents a kind of inner-temple of the diamond world. But I was in London in the dead week after Christmas and managed to speak with an executive in a generous mood. His name is Andy Bone and he wore a tidy button-down shirt under a sweater. We shared a lunch of coq au vin and lobster bisque in the cafeteria and then he took me up to the suite where the gems are distributed to the elite every fifth Monday.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see, but the sight rooms looked like an ordinary set of 1980s-style conference rooms. The only thing that would have set them apart from the architecture of a middlebrow law firm was the presence of square lamps and electronic scales next to the windows, and an eye-in-the-sky security camera bubble mounted on the ceiling. It looked disappointingly ordinary. I sat in one of the padded chairs and said as much.

“Kind of mundane, I agree,” said Bone. “But I suppose it is an important thing, in its own subdued way.”

He wasn’t kidding. Five floors beneath us were a series of vaults that contain the world’s largest stockpile of unpolished diamonds. The exact value of this reserve is a source of some speculation, but the best estimates put it at half a billion dollars. These gems are doled out in the sights at a controlled rate, but to De Beers, they remain much more valuable right where they are. The continuing stability of the diamond industry depends on an artificial scarcity which De Beers has worked hard to create, all the while spending billions in advertising to maintain the image of a diamond as the ultimate token of love. The De Beers organization is now in the midst of trying to reinvent itself as a vendor of specially branded diamonds rather than being the custodian of the trade, but it remains a cartel in the classic sense – an interlocking web of corporate interests designed to eliminate competition. De Beers has managed the remarkable feat of operating a

Visit Tom Zoellner's website and read an excerpt from The Heartless Stone.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Corris's "Appeal Denied"

Peter Corris, "the godfather of Australian crime fiction," applied the "Page 99 Test" to Appeal Denied, the latest volume in his acclaimed Cliff Hardy series, and reported the following:

I’m not given to analysis or critique of my own work, but your approach intrigued me. I hadn’t heard of the Ford Madox Ford dictum (always found him unreadable), but it sounded witty so I was happy to have a shot.

Page 99 of Appeal Denied (Allen & Unwin 2007) embodies many of the effects I try to achieve in my writing – a balance between dialogue and narrative, a demonstration of the attitudes of my protagonist and enough material to keep the reader interested and the story progressing.

I’m fond of American pulp writer Jim Thompson’s pronouncement: “There is only one story – things are not what they seem.” I think this is demonstrated pretty well in the scene on page 99 where things unfold for the characters, become a bit clearer, but they each continue to entertain suspicions that they’re not getting the whole story. One admits that she’s already been duplicitous and is prepared to be so again.

The scene is edgy which is the way I write – without a plan, trusting that things will come right session by session. So far they have.

So, in the case of this one book at least, dreary old FMF was on the money.

Read more about Appeal Denied at the publisher's website, and learn more about the full Cliff Hardy series and Peter Corris's other works at his website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Edwards's "The Arsenic Labyrinth"

Martin Edwards is a prolific crime novelist and story writer. His books and stories include three Lake District mysteries featuring DCI Hannah Scarlett and historian Daniel Kind: The Coffin Trail, The Cipher Garden, and The Arsenic Labyrinth.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the more recent title and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Arsenic Labyrinth, Hannah Scarlett discusses a mysterious phone message with a local journalist, Tony di Venuto. Hannah is a Detective Chief Inspector, in charge of the Cold Case Review Team in England’s Lake District, and she has been prompted to investigate the mystery of the disappearance, ten years ago, of a young woman called Emma Bestwick. Di Venuto has publicised the case in a newspaper article, but he seems to have an obsessive interest in what happened to Emma. Hannah wonders why the woman’s fate seems to matter so much to him, and whether he knows more about it than he is willing to admit. Di Venuto has been phoned by a man who says that Emma is to be found below the Arsenic Labyrinth, a maze of tunnels in the beautiful yet eerie hills above Coniston Water, all that remains of a nineteenth century poison factory.

Hannah is one of the two main characters in my Lake District Mysteries; The Arsenic Labyrinth follows The Coffin Trail and The Cipher Garden. The other protagonist is Daniel Kind, an Oxford historian who has downshifted to the Lakes to escape the rat race. Both Hannah and Daniel are fascinated, as well as haunted, by the past, and although they are in relationships with other people, they are growing closer. That thread of the series isn’t hinted at on page 99, which is all about the mystery, and plot development, rather than the depiction of character and the atmospheric setting, features prominent elsewhere in the book. But creating a complex puzzle with a satisfying solution at the end is important to me, so to that extent page 99 bears out Ford Madox Ford’s eccentric but intriguing claim.

Visit Martin Edwards's website to learn more about The Arsenic Labyrinth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Richtel's "Hooked"

Matt Richtel is an author, journalist, and cartoonist.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to Hooked, his debut novel, and reported the following:

Damn font.

When I wrote Hooked, I had in mind a handful of principles: hyper-speed plot, pointed dialogue, humor, and meaty observation about people and place (it's set in San Francisco/Silicon Valley). It's a book of twists with an underlying question: are we deceived by our perceptions?

Page 99 betrays us.

It is almost none of those things.

Page 99 isn't actually a page at all. It's a quarter of a page, a stump of a page. It's the last moments of chapter 22 -- with the dialogue and action ending after just a few lines, setting up Chapter 23.

I blame the font. Had we picked a different size, or style, page 99 might have been longer, or fallen at a different place, or given us the proper symbolic insights we crave from this prescient, insightful, augur of a page.

And, yet, perhaps, I don't give this font enough credit. Has it built page 99 like this for a reason?

The page is dialogue exchange between our protagonist, Nat Idle, and a tech-savvy friend. The friend has discovered that a laptop Nat has been carrying around is host to an unusual computer program. At this point in the story, we don't have any insight that the laptop may be playing a role in the violence (fires, explosions) besetting Nat's life. But his tech-savvy friend gives us a concrete hint on Page 99's last line, when he says: "It wasn't the program that interested me. It's the fact that it's being guarded by the most sophisticated encryption scheme I've ever seen."

What IS characteristic about page 99 is that it ends with a hook. It's tough, I hope, for the reader not to turn the page to chapter 23 to discover more. And the hook that ends chapter 22 involves computers, which play a central role in the book's conspiracy and resolution.

In that sense, my page 99 represents elements of the book. But fewer than I hope symbolize the book at its best. I blame the font. Now page 128, that's a doozy.

Visit Matt Richtel's website and his blog, and read an excerpt from Hooked.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Cleeves's "Raven Black"

Ann Cleeves is reader-in-residence for the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, and was twice shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award before winning the first Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award last year for Raven Black.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Raven Black and reported the following:

Raven Black is set in Shetland, a bare and beautiful archipelago of islands off the north east point of Scotland. The place is at the root of the plot and informs most of the characters, yet there’s no sense of that on page 99. What we do get is a description of Roy Taylor, the detective who has been sent in from the Scottish mainland to head up the enquiry of the murder of a teenage girl. Taylor isn’t the series character so the description had to be tight and immediate:

Now Taylor got off the bed and stretched. He was standing on the balls of his feet and reached up towards the ceiling. Perez was reminded of an ape he’d seen in Edinburgh Zoo on a school trip. It had pushed against the bars of the enclosure needing more space. Taylor was a man who’d always need more space, Perez thought. Stick him in the middle of an African savannah and it still wouldn’t seem enough for him.

Inspector Perez is a Shetlander – the Spanish name is because his ancestors were shipwrecked during the Armada – and this piece throws up some of the tensions between him and the incomer who has come to take charge of the case. The novel is about belonging, about what it takes to belong and about the discomfort of being an outsider. Perez is an outsider because of his Mediterranean appearance and his exotic name, Taylor because he understands nothing of the culture of the islands.

Perhaps the main turning point in the book comes on page 100, and page 99 leads into this. Everyone assumes that the murderer is an old man called Magnus Tait, who was suspected of abducting a young girl some years before. On page 99 the team discusses the strategy for bringing Magnus in for questioning. At the beginning of page 100 Perez says,

"I don’t think we should jump to the conclusion that Magnus Tait is a killer."

Taylor’s agreement that they should consider other suspects allows the plot to move forward. It also establishes an uneasy alliance between the incomer and Perez.

Visit Ann Cleeves's website and her online diary.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brenda Cooper's "The Silver Ship and the Sea"

Brenda Cooper is a technology professional, a science fiction writer, and a futurist. She’s the co-author of the novel, Building Harlequin's Moon, which she wrote with Larry Niven. Her solo and collaborative short fiction has appeared in multiple magazines, including Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Oceans of the Mind, and The Salal Review.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her novel The Silver Ship and the Sea and reported the following:

Page 99 is the end of one scene, and the set up for the next. In the scene that's ending, the heroine Chelo is concerned about her friend Alicia, who has been accused of murder. Like Chelo, Alicia and four other teenagers are genetically altered, and thus stronger, faster, and more agile than others on the colony planet of Fremont. They aren't exactly well-liked. Chelo is trying to talk Sky, one of Alicia's only friends in the roving band of scientists she lives with, to come forward and speak on Alicia's behalf. This may endanger Sky. But the same forces that have converged to threaten Alicia have angered Sky, and she agrees to meet Chelo later and start a conversation with the colony's leaders.

The beginning of the next scene describes an upcoming harvest feast, but as Chelo walks through the crowd, she is worried.

Even though I can't quite jump up and proclaim page 99 as the most compelling page in the book, I'd say that the main themes – conflict between the six genetically altered children and the rest of the space colony – are plainly visible. Sky, who we are really just meeting for the second time here, turns out to have a few important supporting-cast roles in this book and the sequel.

Visit Brenda Cooper's website and her LiveJournal; read an excerpt from The Silver Ship and the Sea.

--Marshal Zeringue

Todd Buchholz's "The Castro Gene"

Todd Buchholz is a former director of economic policy at the White House and a managing partner of the legendary $15 billion Tiger hedge fund. He is a frequent commentator on ABC News, PBS and CNBC and has advised such leading companies as Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, IBM and Toyota.

Buchholz won the Allyn Young Teaching Prize at Harvard, and holds advanced degrees in economics and law from Cambridge and Harvard. He is the bestselling author of several non-fiction books.

The Castro Gene is his first work of fiction; he applied the "Page 99 Test" to it and reported the following:

I flipped open The Castro Gene and was immediately struck with good news and bad news. The good news? Page 99 launches a new chapter and takes up only half a page! Great, this will be a short test. The bad news? Damn, it looks like an advertisement for Donald Trump, mentioning Trump Towers several times. But the comb-over king is not paying me a placement fee!

Beyond those first impressions, page 99 does neatly sketch out Luke Braden’s big move uptown, out of his “dumpy basement apartment,” with its “shaky aluminum floor lamp, with its dim forty-watt bulb….” As I reread the passage I heard in my head the rollicking gospel theme song from The Jeffersons TV show: “We’re moving on up … to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky-aye-aye.”

Page 99 gives Luke his first hint that he’s being manipulated, a marionette for the billionaire hedge fund mogul, Paul Tremont. Luke didn’t even know he was moving uptown to a luxurious new high-rise until he opened his creaky front door and saw his answering machine blinking:

The first message was from Tremont’s secretary: “Luke, Mr. Tremont asked me to arrange your move to the Trump International Towers…Unless you call me by seven P.M. tonight, the movers will be there tomorrow morning at ten. They’ll do all the packing—”

What? Luke looked at his clock. Shit. Ten thirty P.M.

Luke is stepping onto a ride he cannot control. Hell, he’s being swept onto the ride. Once you let other people pack up the things in your apartment, what is next? I’ve never even let my wife pack my overnight bag. Would I let strangers pack up my whole apartment? Will Luke ever be able to resist the flight to luxury? Who would? He looks down “at the peeling, yellowed linoleum floor in the four by six foot corner the landlord called a kitchen. He pictured the Trump building with its lavish restaurants, swimming pool, and lobby filled with beautiful women, rather than the triple-tatooed, quintuple pierced chicks who meandered through the West Village.”

I confess I flipped over to page 100 and was reminded that Luke suddenly rebels. He grabs a scrap of paper and scribbles: “Hey Movers! Leave everything. Move nothing.” He taped a $50 bill to the note.

Luke desperately wants to move uptown, but on his own terms. There’s a fight ahead. A marionette can’t choose which string to cut.

Visit Todd Buchholz's website and read more about The Castro Gene at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue