J. Kaufman's "The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences"

Jason Kaufman is a sociologist and historian. He is the author of For the Common Good? American Civil Society and the Golden Age of Fraternity and numerous articles on American politics and culture. He is the former John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where he is currently a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences, and reported the following:

In a nutshell, Origins tries to answer a question that I have often mulled over with left-leaning friends: Why can’t the US be more like Canada? Even with a liberal President in the White House and a Conservative Prime Minister in Ottawa, the US is likely to remain a more competitive, litigious, individualistic place than Canada. Origins explores four centuries of North American history in search of answers.

Page 99 itself relates a little known fact about the American revolution: On the brink of the War of Independence, many Americans were just as upset over the King of England’s recent grant of religious freedom to French-Canadians (via the Quebec Act of 1774) as they were over issues relating to colonial political representation, taxation, and so forth.

Anti-Catholicism was a chief cause of the American Revolution!

Page 99 quotes famous patriot Samuel Adams, for example, who says, “I did verily believe, and I do so still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of Popery [i.e. Catholicism] in America, than from the Stamp Acts of any other Acts destructive of civil rights.”

Page 99 also relates how American military strategy in the ensuing War of Independence (mistakenly) revolved around the belief that French-Canadians could be easily convinced to join in this uprising against their English King. When Quebec rebuffed American diplomacy –led by none other than Benjamin Franklin — the American army tried, unsuccessfully, to invade Quebec. (Think Operation Iraqi Freedom.)

Lest you be misled, however, this episode is not mustered in an effort to harp on the Protestant origins of American exceptionalism but to point out the unusual nature of Canada’s founding. By nesting and protecting a pocket of French-Catholics in Anglo-Protestant Canada, the English colonial government laid the groundwork for many of Canada’s contemporary virtues: multi-culturalism; immigrant-friendly people and policies; a long tradition of respecting provincial and local rights; and a government dedicating to mitigating inequality and conflict across and among diverse peoples.

Most democratic countries don’t achieve even half of this. Canada does, I argue, in part because the Quebec Act of 1774 forced all Canadians to at least tacitly respect people from other ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. In contrast, the early American colonial system thrived on conflict, perpetually pitting colony against colony, group against group, and person against person in a winner-take-all system that still flourishes today.

The rest of the book is, I hope, equally as wide-ranging in its observations and conclusions. In particular, it examines how the ‘frontier’ was settled differently in the two countries, and how that impacted their respective economic, political, and civic systems; it also looks at legal culture and conflict-arbitration techniques in both societies over time; and it focuses on how many of the founding visions of each country were undermined over time, for better and worse.

Read an excerpt from The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences, and learn more about the author and his work at Jason Kaufman's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Wiener's "An Empire on Trial"

Martin J. Wiener is Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rice University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, An Empire on Trial, describes the struggle between Governor Arthur Gordon and Trinidad planters in the 1860s over how the ordinary people of this British colony, formerly enslaved blacks and indentured East Indians, were to be treated. This struggle was repeated later in Trinidad and in many other parts of the British empire. It highlights one of the themes of the book, which is that the empire was not only divided racially, but also divided within the dominant "white" race. British officials, on the one hand, and white settlers, landowners and businessmen on the other, often had very different values and aims; indeed, often two distinct and clashing understandings of what "Britishness" and "the rule of law" meant. These clashing understandings deeply influenced the history of the British empire, more so than historians have as yet appreciated.

In the book I use the criminal justice system - the prosecution of inter-racial killing - as a lens through which to explore, in seven different territories of the empire, how this conflict expressed itself over a specific, and highly inflammatory, issue. This conflict was part of a broader conflict than ran through the modern history of the empire, one which has implications even today: between the liberal values that permeated British life and thought and the facts of racial inequality in Britain's empire.

Read an excerpt from An Empire on Trial, and learn more about the book from the Cambridge University Press website.

Martin Wiener's other publications include the books English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 and Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louise Penny's "A Rule Against Murder"

Louise Penny's first Three Pines mystery, Still Life, won the New Blood Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. In the United States it received the prestigious Anthony and Barry Awards at Bouchercon 2007, as well as the Dilys Award for the book that the members of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association most enjoyed selling. Her second in the series, A Fatal Grace, won the 2007 Agatha Award for Best Novel. And her third, The Cruelest Month, was number one on the hardcover Independent Mystery Booksellers Association bestseller list in March 2008.

Penny applied the “Page 99 Test” to A Rule Against Murder, the fourth novel in the series, and reported the following:

I think Page 99 is very representative of the rest of the book in that A Rule Against Murder is about a family at conflict with itself. That much even they know. What they don’t realize is how much at odds they are with the rest of the world. How out of step. The book really is about perception and reality.

Not everyone makes the boat, she thought. But HMCS Morrow was sinking. Even Clara could see that. It was a steamboat in the age of jets. They were old money in a meritocracy. Alarms were sounding. But even Peter, her lovely and thoughtful husband, clung to the wreckage.

On page 99 the body has just been found and revealed to be one of the family. They’re staying at a remote Quebec Inn, a place both luxurious and isolated. The entire Inn has been taken up by the family. Except for two other guests, Armand and Reine Marie Gamache. The Morrows have no idea he’s the Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sûreté du Quebec, and have been treating his as though he’s a slightly thick family retainer.

They’re about to learn the truth. And all their delusions are about to be stripped away. About Gamache, and about themselves.

Learn more about the book and author at Louise Penny's website and her blog.

The Page 69 Test: Still Life.

My Book, The Movie: A Fatal Grace.

The Page 99 Test: The Cruelest Month.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lorne Tepperman's "Betting Their Lives"

Lorne Tepperman is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and is the author of many important books on sociology in Canada.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Betting Their Lives: The Close Relations of Problem Gamblers, and reported the following:

Someone opening my book Betting Their Lives to page 99 would, at first, be puzzled: for this page contains short quotes from Latin American immigrants to Canada. Though puzzling at first, these quotes make an important point that is key to understanding the entire book.

Betting Their Lives is about the reasons people become gambling addicts, compulsive gamblers, or “problem gamblers,” and the ways this gambling addiction affects their family life -- especially, their marriage. It also addresses the role a spouse can play in helping an addict overcome this addiction. It approaches this issue from a sociological standpoint, which is unlike the psychological approach taken by most researchers and therapists. This means the book focuses on the social learning of gambling. It is concerned with the “normality” of gambling, even excessive gambling, and the social determinants of this social problem. So, the book focuses on the family experiences of problem gamblers, as children and as adults. And it focuses on the ways different cultures, communities, and families encourage or discourage gambling.

This it does, in part, by listening to the voices of gamblers from a variety of ethno-cultural backgrounds – Anglos, Hispanics Chinese, Russian, West Indian, and Aboriginal. The data show that members of different ethnocultural communities run different risks of gambling addiction. In turn, this points to important group differences in beliefs about gambling, opportunities to gamble, and incentives to gamble (such as poverty). And, if the causes of gambling addiction are largely social and cultural, then we must make a collective, societal effort to deal with the problem. We cannot leave it to individuals to “get treatment” if they have a gambling problem. Problem gambling is a public health problem, needing a political solution.

In the long-term we need to regulate the gambling industry, including the ways gambling is advertised; we need to re-think the role of government in gambling (i.e., should governments rely on gambling for revenue, as they do increasingly today?); and we need to be more cautious about creating gambling inducements for particularly vulnerable populations (e.g., the young and the old, the housebound, and the impoverished). Meanwhile, we need to help spouses enter the “secret worlds” of problem gamblers, from which they are typically excluded. If the long-term solution is through legislation, the short-term solution is through new marital relationships.

Read more about Betting Their Lives at the Oxford University Press website.

Learn more about Lorne Tepperman's teaching, research and publications.

--Marshal Zeringue

D. Sperling and D. Gordon's "Two Billion Cars"

Daniel Sperling is Professor of Engineering and Environmental Science & Policy at the University of California, Davis, and Founding Director of University of California, Davis's Institute of Transportation Studies. Deborah Gordon is a senior transportation policy analyst who has provided consulting services to the National Commission on Energy Policy, the California Energy Commission, Hewlett Foundation, and the Chinese government to develop fiscal policies for their burgeoning auto fleet.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability, and reported the following:

Over and over, the public interest has been overwhelmed by regional and special interests. This recurring theme is conveyed on Page 99 and elsewhere in Two Billion Cars. When it comes to cars, Detroit’s automakers and their billions in bail out funds amply prove this point. And when it comes to the fuel to power them, corn ethanol is a case where special interests have begotten bad energy policy. On Page 99 readers find out why, when made the American way from corn, ethanol is a clear example of all that’s wrong with U.S. transportation, energy, and climate policy.

Despite its energy, economic, and environmental shortcomings, corn ethanol is the current fuel du jour ordered up by policymakers. Corn ethanol has long been the recipient of massive public subsidies amounting to $10 billion in 2008. Midwest farmers have grown used to these public handouts. On the other hand, federal commitments to clean vehicle and energy R&D have been shortchanged, dwindling to nearly nothing. As a result, real fuel and vehicle solutions that could serve the public interest just cannot compete with corn.

From Page 99:

Corn ethanol is expensive and provides little or no environmental benefit. The only societal benefit is a small reduction in oil imports, but gained at a huge cost. The political success of U.S. corn ethanol demonstrates how narrow special interests can steer federal policy and trump the public interest. Surprisingly, policymakers and the public have steadfastly supported corn ethanol without first determining if this domestic fuel is in America’s best interest. Special interests—American farmers and agribusiness giants in particular—have convinced the public that corn ethanol deserves broad support. It does not.

What we need to do is dig more deeply.

More promising biofuels do exist. These are fuels made from the vast array of cellulosic plant materials: grasses, fast-growing trees, municipal trash, and crop residues. They’re abundant and they’re not crops that would otherwise nourish people. For a given plot of land, cellulosic biofuels have a far smaller carbon footprint than corn. And cellulosic material can even be grown on marginal lands not suitable to farming.

Beyond biofuels, electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are other promising options worth investing in.

The transportation sector is in need of a transformation. It is up to policymakers, industry, and consumers to set clear goals, advance innovative products, and make wise choices so we can accommodate two billion cars on earth.

Learn more about Two Billion Cars at the Oxford University Press website. Visit Deborah Gordon's website and Daniel Sperling's faculty webapge.

--Marshal Zeringue

C.A.J. Coady's "Messy Morality"

With an international reputation for his research in both epistemology and political and applied philosophy, C. A. J. (Tony) Coady is one of Australia's best-known philosophers. His recent publications include Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge, 2007).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his book Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 introduces an objection to my line of argument concerning corruption that I then proceed to analyse and reject. I hope it is sufficiently intriguing to satisfy Ford Madox Ford’s requirements.

The book aims to chart a viable course between several attractive but dangerous philosophical reefs besetting the good ships morality and politics. The first two chapters propose and develop an unusual interpretation of the outlook of “political realism”. This doctrine is commonly read as advocating a form of amoralism regarding politics and international relations. As such, it is easily refuted, but I suggest that we can learn from realism by viewing it as warning against certain distortions of morality, distortions that I call moralism. The realists own best insights are obscured by outright rejection of a role for morality and devotion to a murky concept of national interest in its place. I explore what moralism means in the context of politics and show why it endangers a feasible commitment to a moral engagement with politics.

Chapter 3 discusses the concept of ideals, the analysis of which is much neglected and the positive value of which for politics is often rejected. I explore the nature of ideals and defend their importance for politics against arguments purporting to show that they are useless or positively dangerous. In chapter 4, I seek to unravel the fashionable thesis that it is necessary to have “dirty hands” in politics. This claims that, although morality certainly applies to politics, politicians should occasionally violate the deepest moral prohibitions. The thesis may not make sense (how can it be right to do wrong?) but if it does make sense there remain formidable obstacles to its being true. In the final chapter, I discuss the nature and moral significance of lying and other forms of deceit and relate this to the challenges of political life.

Page 99 starts a section dealing with an objection to the concept of corrupt character, a concept I employ in connection with dirty hands. The objection holds that there is no such thing as character. So, Gilbert Harman has argued that psychological research has refuted the idea of character, showing that belief in it is a product of the “fundamental attribution error”. I argue against this that Harman’s resort to the attribution error and his use of counter-examples in connection with the supposed error is fatally flawed.

Read more about Messy Morality at the Oxford University Press website.

Learn more about Tony Coady at his webpage at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Russell and Cheryl Sharman's "Nightshift NYC"

Russell Leigh Sharman is a writer and anthropologist. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Oxford University in 1999, and now teaches at Brooklyn College. Cheryl Harris Sharman has written for publications including Scientific American Online, The Lancet, The Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) magazine, Perspectives in Health, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Central America’s The Tico Times.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Nightshift NYC, and reported the following:

We believe that the Page 99 Test proves an accurate test for Nightshift NYC. It comes toward the beginning of Chapter Eight, “I Don’t Know Where is the Keys,” about Sunny and his all-night Brooklyn bodega. And it shows Sunny behind the grill on two Saturday nights, managing customers, dropping a few dishes, and talking on the phone. A small excerpt:

“It’s my granddaughter. She’s on the phone.”

Approaching 1 am on another Saturday night, Sunny’s four-year-old granddaughter cannot sleep. He laughs into the phone and offers a few soothing words. Sunny’s graying hair is freshly cut but he sports a day’s graying stubble on his chin. His paper chef’s hat has a blue stripe tonight, his black t-shirt advertises vintagedj.com, and his pants are crisp Tommy Hilfiger khakis. He hangs up and says with a broad smile, “She wants me to bring her a cheeseburger for breakfast.”

Page 99 also describes how Sunny, a self-described Palestinian, came to New York from Ramallah, speaks Hebrew with Israeli regulars, and doesn’t let politics interfere with commerce.

But the main reason why it’s an accurate test of the quality of the whole is that it speaks to the immigrant experience in New York City, which became a key theme. Page 99 discusses the difficulties immigrants face when owning businesses in New York City. There are the usual entrepreneurial struggles to acquire credit and capital, and to overcome bureaucratic obstacles, but these are compounded by their newcomer status and language barriers. Digressing a bit, to Page 98, a 2007 report from the Center for an Urban Future found foreign-born New Yorkers to be more likely than native-born to start businesses, sometimes twice as likely. Immigrants from some Middle Eastern countries start businesses at more than twice the rate of native-born New Yorkers, sometimes four times as often. But, back to Page 99, for entrepreneurial immigrants from the Middle East, things changed after September 11, 2001. Deportments and detainments shut down many of these small businesses. For those still open, their owners and workers routinely face being called terrorists.

However, Page 99 also reflects the whole by capturing the specific to show the myriad ways nightshift workers live inverted lives. Because Sunny is wide awake, he has the time and patience to talk with a sleepless child. Because he will be awake and off work when she wakes, he can enjoy breakfast with her. Because he understands the strange logic of working nights, he can grant her wish for a cheeseburger for breakfast. These are the benefits of a life out of phase. But there are, of course, costs. He must talk with her by telephone because he cannot be there in person. He eats breakfast with her because he’s asleep while she plays during the day. And he’ll surely raise a few eyebrows for bringing her that cheeseburger for breakfast.

Visit the Nightshift NYC website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Blaize Clement's "Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof"

Blaize Clement is the author of the Dixie Hemingway mysteries: Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter, Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund, and Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new novel, Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof, and reported the following:

I'm not sure why, but stories printed in book format have a slightly different quality than they do when they've been spit out by a printer on eight-by-eleven paper. The difference is even greater between printed books and pages read on a computer screen, and different in another way when they're narrated by a disembodied voice on a CD. It's as if each medium contributes something of itself to the story, so the story changes slightly according to how we receive it.

Take page 99 of Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof, for example. I've seen those words a zillion times. On the screen when I wrote them, again and again as I reviewed and edited them, finally in hard copy, then in the publisher's "first pass pages." Today I read them in the final publication to see if Ford Madox Ford was right when he said that page 99 of any book reveals the quality of the entire book.

I recognized the page immediately. It's when Dixie is talking to Sergeant Owens, her former commanding officer, who is quizzing her about a murdered woman. The passage reads:

Owens deliberated a moment. "You know anybody else who could identify her?"

"Besides me?"

"I think it would be better if it was somebody else, Dixie. You don't need to see that."

My heart quivered. Morgan had upchucked at seeing Laura's body, and now Owens wanted to protect me from seeing it.

"It's that bad?"

"It's about as bad as it can get, Dixie."

It's funny how your mind can split at times like that. One side of my brain recoiled from what was happening around me. The other side was cool as grass. The cool side knew investigators would look through Laura's address books looking for names and numbers for her relatives. The cool side knew calls would be made, awful truths said, grim arrangements made.

The cool side said, "I'll take care of Leo until the house is cleaned up."

"Leo?"

"Laura's cat."

And there it is -- the quality of the book as a whole. The writing style, the way a woman's murder is handled, the fact that a pet is left and that Dixie assumes responsibility for it. Page 99 even explains why my mysteries are so often called "dark," even though they're also described as "laugh-out-loud funny." Dixie is often funny, but murder never is. And Dixie is the kind of person who takes care of pets who get left behind when their humans die. So from my perspective, Ford Madox Ford was right. Page 99 really does reveal the quality of the whole of Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof.

Learn more about the book and author at Blaize Clement's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc Egnal's "Clash of Extremes"

Marc Egnal is a professor of history at York University and the author of several books, including A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution and Divergent Paths: How Culture and Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War, and reported the following:

Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War presents a new interpretation of the causes of the sectional conflict. It’s the first extensive rethinking of the reasons for the war since James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom appeared in 1988. If McPherson’s book can be summarized with the single word “slavery,” Clash of Extremes can be boiled down to “economics.”

The playful spirits that preside over page ninety-nines, offer up a sheet with only five words -- “Part Two: Roots of Conflict.” The first part, “An Era of Compromise,” discusses how economic ties, such as Mississippi commerce, kept the country together during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Part Two looks at developments that shattered those unities. These including changing patterns of trade and the rise of antislavery. The last two parts examine the intensifying sectional clash and the period after 1861.

Readers will find that Clash of Extremes is more than a new argument about the causes of the war. It’s also a story built around the perceptions and actions of many individuals. In writing the book I was concerned to make it a “good read,” not simply a work that (I hope) will lead historians to rethink long-held assumptions about the causes of the war.

Learn more about Clash of Extremes at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin Marozzi's "The Way of Herodotus"

Justin Marozzi is a writer, journalist, and historian who has traveled extensively throughout the Herodotean world. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Tamerlane.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Way of Herodotus: Travels with the Man Who Invented History, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Way of Herodotus takes us to Baghdad, to a conversation I had with an Iraqi academic called Fadel over lunch in Saddam Hussein's old republican palace. The discussion began after I spotted a Christian evangelical pamphlet on the table, belittling Islam and calling for the conversion of Muslims. I was surprised to say the least, Fadel rather less so.

“You asked me a moment ago if I thought this was a religious war,” Fadel said. “Well, I don’t think it is. There are all sorts of other reasons for this war. But many Iraqis do feel President Bush is attacking Islam. They listen to the language he uses, they listen to his call for a crusade, and they remember the history of Islam and the West. History matters very much here.”

It was a classic clash of civilisations embodied in one word.

In one sense, it was a minor gaffe. In the largely non-Muslim West, the word crusade is not considered so offensive. Over the past thousand years it has managed to shed much of its historical baggage in general usage so that outside discussions of the eleventh-, twelfth- and thirteenth-century attempts to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims, we understand it more in the sense of the Oxford English Dictionary’s “vigorous movement or enterprise against poverty or a similar social evil” or as a “personal campaign undertaken for a particular cause”. Many would excuse Bush for what might have been – claims of presidential Christian fundamentalism notwithstanding - a simple slip of the tongue. Yet Muslims, with a more narrowly historical definition and understanding of the word, are unlikely to be so forgiving. Victims tend to have longer historical memories. If the leader of the Western world used the word crusade in the context of launching a war on terrorism, was it any wonder that many Muslims considered this a war on Islam?

Travelling through Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece with Herodotus over the course of four years, cultural collisions were regular occurrences. Iraq was the extreme manifestation of this, a conflict which sounded the echoes of the catacylsmic Persian Wars reported by Herodotus two-and-a-half millennia ago. That conflict helped give birth to the West, to what we know today as freedom and democracy.

Herodotus warns us again and again of the dangers of failing to respect other nations' cultures and religion. He cautions that hubris, imperial and otherwise, is likely to lead to hubris.

Apart from his obvious wisdom, Herodotus is huge fun to read. He tells rollicking good yarns, full of sex, humour, fantasy, speculation, architectural surveys, revelling in the weird and the wonderful and never missing an opportunity to digress wherever and whenever the fancy takes him. Not only was he the Father of History. He was the world's first travel writer, foreign correspondent and anthropologist, a pioneering geographer and explorer, author of the world's first prose narrative and a raconteur bar none.

Learn more about the book and author at Justin Marozzi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue