Geoff Nicholson's "The Lost Art of Walking"

Geoff Nicholson is the author of many books, including Sex Collectors, Hunters and Gatherers, The Food Chain, and Bleeding London, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Lost Art of Walking runs thus:

was ever recognized by fellow walkers.

“For a period I kept bumping into people somewhere around Shoreditch,” he said, “who were actually walking about with books of mine, doing various projects from the books, but I haven’t of late seen any.”

And did he reveal himself to them?

“A couple challenged me, and one I saw just reading the book and talked to him and pointed something out that he was looking for, and a couple of times on the canal too, a guy on a bike who was cycling through one of the books and ticking things off. He practically ran into me. But I think there are huge numbers of people walking, not my books, but walking and doing their own endlessly strange projects across London.”

I mentioned reading D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers” when I was a teenager, and being amazed by the huge distances the hero Paul Morel would walk in order to go and see his girlfriend Miriam. Sinclair’s eyes lit up. Yes indeed, he said.

The fictional Miriam is closely based on Lawrence’s own girlfriend, Jessie Chambers. Morel’s mother says, “She must be wonderfully fascinating, that you can’t get away from her, but must go trailing eight miles at this time of night.”

And she’s right, of course. Miriam is wonderfully fascinating. The evenings together, Paul and Miriam’s, D.H.’s and Jessie’s, were intense and passionate, and one of the passions was for literature. In Jessie Chambers’ memoirs she mentions the books they discussed. Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons” was one of them, its title perhaps an inspiration for Lawrence’s own novel.

Iain Sinclair got up, left the room we were sitting in and came back a minute or two later with a small, blue, hardback copy of “Fathers and Sons.” He opened it up and held it out to me. There on the flyleaf was the signature “Jessie Chambers.” This was Jesse Chambers’ own copy of “Father’s and Sons.” This book had belonged to the woman for whom Lawrence was prepared to do so much walking. Iain Sinclair had been given the book by a dealer, as a thank you for carrying a box of books across the street for him.

(Actually it cuts off at the beginning of that last paragraph but I’ve included all of it for the sake of being comprehensible).

*

Page 99 of my book The Lost Art of Walking finds me in conversation with the great English writer, walker (and sometimes psychogeographer) Iain Sinclair, author of Lights Out For the Territory and London Orbital among other works of fiction and non-fiction.

Sinclair is a crucial, looming presence for anyone who tries to write about walking and/or London. He has a stomping ground that’s very much his own but his influence is ubiquitous for the would-be London literary pedestrian. That’s why I wanted him in the book rather than outside it.

On page 99 we’re talking about DH Lawrence. There was a great temptation for many young English men of a certain generation and class to think of ourselves as Lawrencian heroes. They were sensitive, creative, did a lot of walking, had a tough relationship with their father, but also had a lot of sex. I wanted to be like that and sometimes flattered myself that I was.

When I was seventeen I started dating a somewhat posh girl who lived on the other side of the city: this was Sheffield, England in the seventies. Of course I had no car, and so from time to time, having missed the last bus, I’d walk home across the city: probably five miles of so, and up some very steep English hills.

I was able to console myself by thinking I was treading, metaphorically, in Lawrence’s footsteps. And then my English teacher introduced me to TS Eliot’s poetry especially “Rhapsody on A Windy Night.” As the years have gone by I’ve become far less certain what this poem is “about” but back then it seemed a not too complicated poem about a nocturnal walk across London. Walking home through the night, sharing territory with Lawrence and Eliot I felt my epiphany as walker and aspiring writer was just about complete. I had a lot to learn.

Oddly enough, or perhaps not, this page is actually fairly representative of what I’m trying to do in the book, combining anecdote, factual material, personal experience and literary allusion. Ford Madox Ford had a good point.

Read more about The Lost Art of Walking, and learn about the author and his work at Geoff Nicholson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert A. Saunders' "The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen"

Robert A. Saunders is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Economics & Politics at Farmingdale State College-SUNY.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the Battle over Borat, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s “Page 99” test works quite well with my book The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Ethnic Pantomime, and the Battle over Borat. On that particular page [below right, click to enlarge], I address the first public spat between the Kazakhstani government and the ribald British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat as well as Ali G and Bruno. The text begins with a quote from Talgat Kaliyev, the First Secretary of Kazakhstan’s embassy to the United Kingdom, in which he asserts that his country is nothing like the post-Communist phantasmagoria depicted in Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show. The remarks followed the 2000 premiere of the program in the UK. Kaliyev states: “We can take a joke like anyone else. But this has gone too far—it’s a form of racism.... My country is a young country, so you have to understand that we are sensitive to such matters. We do not like the behavior, the manners of this character. He has no idea how to behave in society, asking such questions as he does. We are a secular, modern state, not a state of such barbarians. If this were in a newspaper, this would not be so bad because people might forget it the next day. But this is broadcast to a huge audience.” Building on this quote, I discuss how the diplomat’s attempts to counter the Boratistan parody fell on deaf ears in the West. Still obsessed with Cold War tropes of crumbling gray buildings, bushy-browed party officials, and forlorn citizens, the British press used Kaliyev’s indignation to frame Kazakhstan—a progressive and welcoming country by post-Soviet standards—in a most unflattering way. I write: “Such coverage had a decisively counter-productive effect vis-à-vis the intentions of the diplomatic corps. Rather than reversing negative stereotypes generated out of thin air by Sacha Baron Cohen, the media attention affirmed and/or reinforced generic perceptions of the country as a Sovietesque, tin-pot dictatorship.” Near the end of the page, I analyze how Kazakhstan’s tentative first steps in engaging Baron Cohen’s parody—which included an ill-conceived demand that the British government put a stop to his antics—floundered: “The notion that Borat would or could be banned was taken as incontrovertible evidence that the Kazakhstani government was still suffering a post-totalitarian hangover.” As the face of the new Kazakhstan, Kaliyev himself even came under scrutiny. As he tried to defend his country, he was alternatively portrayed as a blustering buffoon or an iniquitous enemy of free speech. Overall, this page provides the reader with a brief but evocative morsel. One of my principle aims in writing this book was to explore the impact of the spread of global media on 21st century statecraft. This selection provides a keyhole glimpse of one aspect of this phenomenon: the current difficulties of combating mass-mediated threats to a country’s national image or—to use a more appropriate term for our times—its “brand.”

Read more about The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, and learn more about the author and his work at Robert A. Saunders' faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Beard's "The Fires of Vesuvius"

Mary Beard has a Chair of Classics at Cambridge and is a Fellow of Newnham College. She is classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog “A Don’s Life.” Last year she applied the Page 99 Test to The Roman Triumph.

Now she has applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, and reported the following:

My own Page 99 would, I think, have pleased Ford Madox Ford. For it does indeed miraculously capture what my Fires of Vesuvius is trying to do.

Fires is meant not only as an introduction to Pompeii for those who have visited and for those who haven’t – but also as exploration of everyday life in an ordinary Roman town. (Pompeii is very special now, but it was very ordinary indeed 2000 years ago.) I try to show that an awful lot of what we are told about the ancient city and Roman life in general is (sadly...?) fantasy. Or at least it is a projection of our own world onto the Romans.

But I’m determined not to be one of those gloomy scholars who leaves every myth destroyed and nothing much in their place. Lots of the things we thought we knew about Rome aren’t true. But there are lots of unexpected things we CAN still discover. I mean Fires to be an entry point to a familiar and simultaneously quite alien world.

Page 99 hits that message home. We are in the middle of a discussion of “House and Home” at Pompeii. Who lived in the large Roman houses that we now see preserved there? What kind of families? Where did they drink, cook, eat and sleep? What was ‘home life’ at Rome like?

Well, for a start, as Page 99 insists, these families were not like ours (or like the stereotype of ours…). Large houses in Pompeii were not occupied by Mum and Dad, with a couple of kids (plus, this being Rome, a couple of slaves). The Pompeian house contained not so much a ‘household’, as a ‘houseful’. It was an agglomeration of people living behind the same front door -- a nuclear family, plus slaves, ex-slaves and a whole variety of hangers on, many acting as servants, but others running shops or commercial enterprises attached to these elite houses. (In some ways it was a bit like modern Naples, where you often find a carpenter’s shop or hardware store on the ground floor of grand homes.)

So – one difference between us and Rome lies in family and social structure.

Another is in domestic life and layout. Modern visitors tend to walk into the surviving houses at Pompeii and try to identify the bedrooms, the kitchen, the lounges and so on. Actually it’s harder than that. Most rooms in an ancient house were ‘multi-functional’, and we honestly have little idea of where people slept and how.

There are puzzling absences. As I observe on Page 99, there appears to be no such thing as a double bed in Pompeii. Did man and wife just squash up? And where did the slaves sleep? Perhaps on upper floors (most of which don’t survive), or maybe on the floor outside the master bedroom?

Intriguing questions.

Overall Page 99 offers a glimpse of a Roman life that we can understand and easily reconstruct – and yet is always tantalizingly just beyond our reach.

Read an excerpt from The Fires of Vesuvius, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Visit Mary Beard's University of Cambridge faculty webpage and read her blog, “A Don's Life.”

--Marshal Zeringue

Fairlie & Robb's "Race and Entrepreneurial Success"

Robert W. Fairlie is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation. Alicia M. Robb is a Research Associate in Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a senior economist with Beacon Economics.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Race and Entrepreneurial Success: Black-, Asian-, and White-Owned Businesses in the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a summary page on how we explore the relative underperformance of black-owned businesses. So, it’s not too bad of a page to look at to get a feel for the book.

About the book:

Thirteen million people in the United States—roughly one in ten workers—own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so throughout the twentieth century. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-American owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not.

Selected Findings from the Book:

• African-American owned businesses have lower sales and profits, hire fewer employees, have smaller payrolls, and have higher closure rates than white-owned businesses.

• Asian-American owned firms have higher sales, profits, employment, and survival rates than white-owned firms.

• Family links in business ownership are strong. Half of all business owners had a self-employed family member prior to starting their business, and entrepreneurs who work in family businesses have business outcomes that are 10-40 percent better.

• Education and prior work experience in a similar type of business are also important for entrepreneurial success.

• Access to startup capital is essential for success in business. Firms with higher levels of startup capital are less likely to close, have higher profits and sales, and are more likely to hire employees.

• Black-owned businesses start with substantially lower levels of financial capital than white-owned firms, which is the single largest factor contributing to racial disparities in business performance.

• Black business owners are less likely to work in family businesses, negatively affecting black business outcomes.

• Black business owners are found to have lower levels of education than white business owners, on average.

• The most important factor in contributing to the higher survival rates, profits, employment, and sales of Asian-owned firms is that Asian-American entrepreneurs invest more startup capital in their firms than white entrepreneurs.

• Nearly half of all Asian business owners are college educated, which is a major reason Asian-owned businesses are successful.

Read the Preface and Introduction to Race and Entrepreneurial Success, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stuart Banner's "Who Owns the Sky?"

Stuart Banner is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. His publications include The Death Penalty: An American History, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier, and Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Who Owns the Sky?: The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On, and reported the following:

Who Owns the Sky? is about an important but largely forgotten legal problem in the early years of flight. English and American common law had always said that landowners owned the airspace above their land, with no height limit. As the ancient maxim put it, cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum – he who owns the soil owns up to the sky. If that remained true, the new airplanes would have nowhere to fly, because they would be trespassing almost everywhere they went. The government couldn’t simply take the airspace away from landowners and give it to pilots without violating the constitution, lawyers worried, because airspace was a kind of property, and a taking of property required compensation. So how would the planes ever get off the ground?

The issue was intertwined with all sorts of broader questions being debated at the time, some of which had to with the nature of the common law itself. Where exactly did the common law come from? Was it something judges found or something they made? And how did it change? Page 99 comes near the end of a chapter about these questions.

Condemning the airspace, however, would have been an enormous administrative burden. R. Floyd Clarke shuddered at the prospect of “the description in a petition of condemnation of all the parcels of real estate throughout the State and notice to all the owners, mortgagees, etc.” Just notifying the landowners, Clarke despaired, would be “a stupendous and almost impossible undertaking.” And even if that hurdle could have been mounted, condemnation might well have required separate hearings, and possibly even jury trials, for each individual landowner, at which each would have the opportunity to establish the amount of loss that he or she would individually suffer from overflights. For anyone who gave thought to the time and expense that would be involved in condemning enough airspace to allow commercial air travel, the use of the state or federal government’s eminent domain power was not an attractive option. Promoters of aviation were back to the constitutional problem. A statute abrogating the cujus est solum maxim, by allowing aviators to fly over private land, ran a considerable risk of being held unconstitutional.

This was why lawyers in the 1910s and 1920s paid so much attention to the common law. Because of the fiction that judges did not make the law but found it, a judicial determination that aviators could fly over private property was not susceptible to constitutional challenge. If a judge, rather than a legislature, were to modify the cujus est solum maxim, the surface discourse of the legal system would not deem him to be changing the law at all. He would instead be understood to be discerning what the law had always been.

Read an excerpt from Who Owns the Sky?, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Visit Stuart Banner's UCLA Law faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Hempton's "Evangelical Disenchantment"

David Hempton is Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, Harvard University. His book Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, published by Yale University Press, was awarded the Jesse Lee Prize.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book deals with a conversation between two of the most important early feminists in the United States about the role of religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, in advancing or retarding the aspirations of women. The advice given to Sarah Grimké, a female pioneer of the anti-slavery movement, was that “Doctrines, which occupy so prominent a place in Christianity, have eaten the life out of pure love. Let them go dearest.” Grimké obeyed her correspondent’s charge, eventually forsaking evangelicalism for spiritualism, and repression for emancipation, a route many other women have taken over the years.

Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt looks at evangelicalism, one of the most powerful religious traditions in the United States and the wider world, through the eyes of well-known individuals who once embraced the evangelical tradition but later repudiated it. I recount the faith journeys of nine creative artists, social reformers, and public intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including Sarah Grimké, George Eliot (the English novelist), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (America’s most famous suffragist), Vincent Van Gogh (the Dutch painter), and James Baldwin (the African American writer). In the process the book opens up issues of race, gender, and power, and looks at evangelicalism’s relationship to fundamentalism, other world religions, and secularization. Through the writing of compelling mini-biographies, my aim is to shed fresh, and more profoundly personal, light on the evangelical movement and its relation to the wider culture. These portraits of faith and doubt are moving, and at times heartbreaking, accounts of how some evangelical Christians encountered the complexities of their worlds.

Read an excerpt from Evangelical Disenchantment, and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

Visit David Hempton's Harvard Divinity School faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew R. Murphy's "Prodigal Nation"

Andrew R. Murphy is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Bruswick. He is the author of Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America, the co-editor of Religion, Politics, and the American Identity: New Directions, New Controversies, and the editor of The Political Writings of William Penn.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11, and reported the following:

Opening Prodigal Nation to p. 99 lands the reader in the middle of a discussion of the Christian Right narrative of American moral decline. While Jerry Falwell laments the sexual revolution, Pat Robertson paints with a broader brush:

Until modern times, the foundations of law rested on the Judeo-Christian concept of right and wrong and the foundational concept of Original Sin.... Modern, secular sociology, however, shuns such biblical teachings in favor of an evolutionary hypothesis based on the ideas of Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and others. This view, often called “secular humanism,” takes the view that man has evolved from the slime and that with time and ever greater freedoms, mankind will ascend to the stars. These ideas, which are contrary to the Word of God, have led directly to the bitter conflict and social chaos of our day....

The legacy of the 1960s is still with us today. The free-love, anti-war, psychedelic 1960s proclaimed not only the right of dissent but the right to protest against and defame the most sacred institutions of the nation.... Free love, the rise of pagan cults, and the New Age movement have all thrived in this atmosphere of defiance. And what may prove to be the greatest holocaust in history—the abortion movement—is one of its most sinister expressions. [Robertson, quoted in Prodigal Nation, p. 99]

Page 99 comes near the end of Part I of the book, which presents three important episodes in American history in which the jeremiad (a form of political rhetoric that laments the present, looks to the past for guidance, and calls for reform) has played a key role: early New England, the Civil War, and the rise of the Christian Right. Even when lamenting the nation’s decline, however, and interpreting calamities as God’s punishment on a wayward people, the jeremiad reaffirms America’s role as a “city on a hill” with a special role to play in God’s plans for human history.

To be honest, though, I’d rather direct the reader ten pages forward, to p. 109. That page opens Chapter 5, which I think is Prodigal Nation’s most important chapter. In Chapter 5, I distinguish between two types of American jeremiad. The traditionalist jeremiad is the type seen on p. 99, in which the solutions to present-day problems lie in a return to “the way things used to be.” The traditionalist jeremiad offers a political agenda using the past as a blueprint for the future (for the Christian Right, outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, supporting prayer in public schools, and so on). But there is another way of looking to the past for insights into contemporary problems, and Prodigal Nation also traces a progressive jeremiad throughout American history, epitomized by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. This progressive jeremiad looks to the past, not as a blueprint or model for the future, but as the source of principles of liberty and equality inherent in the American founding, which hold the key for moving the nation forward into a diverse and pluralistic future. Rooted in different ways of understanding the American past, these two types of jeremiads in turn offer sharply contrasting visions for the American future. The remainder of the book argues that the progressive jeremiad offers the most promising way forward into the twenty-first century American future.

Read more about Prodigal Nation at the Oxford University Press website, and learn more about Andrew R. Murphy's research and publications at his faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Price's "Making Empire"

Richard N. Price is Professor in and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Maryland.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa, and reported the following:

If you open my book, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa, at page 99 you will find part of a story about a nineteenth century African chief. His name was Maqoma, and he was a member of the Xhosa peoples who occupied the south eastern part of what is today South Africa. The story concerns his relationship with two missionaries, James Read and Henry Calderwood. On the same page you will also find a brief account of Maqoma’s negotiations with the British imperial state, and the page ends with the opening sentences of an account of how missionaries and other agents of the British colonial presence sought to understand the Xhosa peoples that they encountered in the eastern part of the Cape Colony in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Those stores capture the key themes that run through my book. I called the book “Making Empire” because it tells how the British came to rule the Xhosa peoples of Southern Africa. And the first words of its subtitle, “Colonial Encounters,” suggest that this process happened through the interactions between British missionaries, colonial officers, military men and others.

The stories of encounter that form the core of the book were researched in Cape Town and elsewhere. I wanted to understand the process by which an empire was created. I was fortunate enough to find records that detailed what the missionaries and others were thinking as they tried to deal with the complexities of Xhosa politics and culture, and as they were driven to conclude that the only way to deal with these people was to subdue and subjugate them to British rule.

Visit Richard Price's faculty webpage, and learn more about Making Empire at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Boyle's "The Public Domain"

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law, and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, and reported the following:

I don't think page 99 [inset, below right] proves Ford's assertion.

I'd prefer page the first page of the preface. It reads:

Each person has a different breaking point. For one of my students it was United States Patent number 6,004,596 for a “Sealed Crustless Sandwich.” In the curiously mangled form of English that patent law produces, it was described this way:

A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings there between. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.¹

“But why does this upset you?” I asked; “you’ve seen much worse than this.” And he had. There are patents on human genes, on auctions, on algorithms.² The U.S. Olympic Committee has an

Visit James Boyle's faculty webpage, and learn more about The Public Domain at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Everett's "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes"

Daniel L. Everett is the Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, and reported the following:

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes is a book about living among the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon and the discoveries, scientific and personal, I made during the thirty years of regular contact with them. My family and I lived among the Pirahas for nearly eight years.

On page 99 I am talking about an incident that taught me a great deal about Piraha culture and my own views of parenting. Here is part of what I say on that page:

Piraha parenting involves no violence, at least in principle. But my model of parenting did. It is worth contrasting the two here because ultimately I have come to believe that the Pirahas have a healthier attitude in many ways than I did at the time. I was a young father - Shannon was born when I was nineteen. And because of my immaturity and Christian parenting framework, I thought that corporeal punishment was appropriate and useful, following the biblical injunction that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Shannon, as my oldest child, often suffered the worst of this phase of my life. In the village one day, she said something to me that I thought entitled her to a spanking. I got a switch and told her to meet me in the bedroom. She started yelling that she didn't need a spanking. The Pirahas came quickly, as they always did when we sounded angry.

'What are you doing, Dan?' a couple of women asked.

'I'm, uh, well ...' Hmm. I didn't have an answer. What the hell *was* I doing?

Anyway, I felt the weight of the Bible and so I told Shannon, 'OK, no spanking here. Meet me at the end of the airstrip and pick another switch along the way. I will meet you there in five minutes!'

As Shannon started out of the house, Pirahas asked her where she was going.

'My dad is going to hit me on the airstrip,' she replied with a mix of irritation and glee, knowing what the effects of her words would be.

Piraha children and adults came running behind me when I left. I was defeated. No more spankings..."

What I go on to discuss on that page is how I learned from the Pirahas corporeal punishment was a strange and ineffective way to teach children about life. Since I had believed so strongly in this and its biblical foundation prior to my confrontation with the Pirahas it was a direct challenge to my philosophies of child-rearing and indeed my philosophy of life to think that there were other ways of helping children develop into responsible adults.

The Pirahas don't coerce children, just as they don't, by and large, coerce anyone in their society. There are always exceptions, of course, but children are not 'beaten into submission' by their parents. So how do Piraha children learn responsibility? They are given tasks relating to the well-being of the family, such as gathering fruits and nuts, fishing, collecting firewood, and so on. If they fail, everyone suffers, including them. They can be scolded, as any other member, but the main lesson they learn is by doing without something crucial because of their own irresponsibility. They mature quickly.

My daughter, Shannon, tells me that I did not learn this lesson as quickly as I imply in the book, however. I suppose that this is the way that many of us create our reality - we learn a lesson and then perhaps remember that lesson being in our lives longer than it actually has been.

One question that has occurred to me and to generations of philosophers is whether or not people are really capable of changing their minds, at least about things that are truly significant to them. Another way of putting this is whether people are capable of recognizing errors in their thinking so egregious that the only way to change course is to make an epistemological 180 degree turn. I think that being in a closed environment that is radically different from the environment that we were raised in is a possible situation in which such change might occur.

From the simple lesson on p99 of my book about spanking/smacking my child other, equally profound models of being a human being on this planet were brought into focus.

The Pirahas have taught me, as so many other groups have taught foreigners out of their element over the years, about parenthood and life, among many other things. Encounters with 'the Other' in literature and life are vital components of our growth in life and thought.

Read more about Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes at the Knopf website.

--Marshal Zeringue