George C. Edwards' "The Strategic President"

George C. Edwards III is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University. His many books include On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit. He is the editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Strategic President: Persuasion and Opportunity in Presidential Leadership, and reported the following:

Presidential leadership is at the core of American government, but an intriguing paradox has bedeviled our efforts to understand it. On the one hand is the widespread view that “presidential power is the power to persuade.” Conversely, there is a dearth of evidence of the persuasive power of the presidency, and presidents frequently fail to persuade others to support their policies, often undermining their ability to govern in the process. I decided to use this contradiction as a springboard to examine—and ultimately challenge—the dominant paradigm of presidential leadership.

Focusing on best test cases of presidential leadership of the public (Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan) and Congress (FDR, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan), I sought to determine the source of their success. I found that despite their considerable rhetorical skills, the public was unresponsive to their appeals for support. To achieve change, these leaders capitalized on existing public opinion. Similarly, in dealing with Congress they recognized especially favorable conditions for passing their agendas and effectively exploited these circumstances while they lasted.

I also looked at presidents governing in less auspicious circumstances, and found that whatever successes these presidents enjoyed also resulted from the interplay of conditions, and the presidents’ skills at understanding and exploiting them.

Explaining these results requires analyzing the many obstacles to successful leadership. Page 99 is part of a discussion of the difficulties presidents have in setting the country’s agenda and the stern competition they face in attempting to do so.

Presidential power, then, is not the power to persuade. Presidents cannot reshape the contours of the political landscape to pave the way for change by establishing an agenda and persuading the public, Congress, and others to support their policies. Instead, successful presidents facilitate change by recognizing opportunities in their environments and fashioning strategies and tactics to exploit them. Presidents who base their strategies of governing on the premise of the persuasive presidency are destined to fail.

Read an excerpt from The Strategic President, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Learn more about the author and his work at George C. Edwards III's Texas A& M webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gordon Barrass' "The Great Cold War"

Gordon Barrass is former British diplomat who served on the Joint Intelligence Committee in London during the last years of the Cold War.

He applied the page 179 test to his new book, The Great Cold War: A Journey Through the Hall of Mirrors, and reported the following:

I had long felt that if we were ever to understand the fraught half century of confrontation that we call the Cold War, we would need to explore the perceptions each side had of the other. Besides researching the papers once held in secret archives, I travelled to Moscow and Washington to interview nearly one hundred of the key players. These included top policy makers, strategists and military commanders and key figures in the world of intelligence in Moscow and Washington. They provided some eye opening accounts of what was going on behind the scenes, as well as many valuable insights into the mixture of insecurity, ignorance and ambition that drove the rivalry between the two opposing forces.

When I asked Milt Bearden, a former senior CIA officer, what he thought had been the West’s most serious intelligence failure during the Cold War he responded pithily, saying: “We didn’t realize just how f***ing scared Soviet leaders were of us!” Page 179 provides a riveting example of their horror of nuclear war and some vignettes showing that Leonid Brezhnev had no wish to go anywhere near Armageddon.

Page 179:

After the Moscow Summit Marshal Grechko invited Brezhnev and some of his colleagues to take part in a “war game,” seemingly hoping to stiffen Brezhnev’s resolve in dealing with the harsh realities of a nuclear war. The exercise began with generals describing the impact of a surprise attack by over a thousand American missiles. They grimly explained that 80 million people would be killed, the armed forces obliterated, 85% of industry destroyed and European Russia so irradiated as to be uninhabitable. General Danilevich recalled that “Brezhnev and Kosygin were visibly terrified by what they heard.”

Marshal Grechko then asked Brezhnev to push a button that would launch a “retaliatory strike,” which in reality involved the launch of just three missiles with dummy warheads along a test range. Brezhnev turned pale, began perspiring and trembled visibly. He repeatedly asked Grechko, “Is this definitely an exercise?” The leadership were traumatized by this experience. None of them ever again participated in such an exercise. Brezhnev immediately ordered yet tighter controls to ensure that there could never be unauthorized use of Soviet nuclear weapons.

It was clear that none of the leadership wanted a nuclear confrontation, especially Brezhnev, who was a bon viveur of the first order. In his diary, he often wrote little notes about lovely ladies who had made him feel good. On his way to visit Nixon in 1973, he took such a shine to a Soviet air hostess that he had her made a “nurse” in his official party so that she could comfort him at night. During the same visit, Brezhnev’s enthusiasm for women was famously documented in a photo [at right, click to enlarge] of him admiring Jill St. John’s rear. This man had no wish to go anywhere near Armageddon.

While the Soviet leadership fretted over the inadequacies of their strategic nuclear forces, they had one great source of comfort—they knew that the West believed that before long Soviet strategic forces would have the upper hand. This was a perception that worked to Moscow’s political advantage.

Read the prologue to The Great Cold War, and learn more about the book at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Antje Ellermann's "States Against Migrants"

Antje Ellermann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at The University of British Columbia.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, States Against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 of States against Migrants, shows a bar chart that displays the deportation of various groups of migrants by German immigration authorities in the 1990s. The chart reveals a striking pattern: failed asylum seekers feature more prominently than illegal immigrants among those expelled from Germany. This pattern is remarkable for two reasons. First, it is greatly at odds from deportation trends in the United States. Second, it is an expression of the German state’s remarkable coercive capacity because it is far easier to deport illegal immigrants than failed asylum seekers.

States against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States is a contemporary study of the capacity of liberal democratic states to coercively regulate individuals within their borders. In this book, I argue that deportation places extraordinarily high demands on the state. Because it imposes severe hardship on migrants and their families, and because it often involves the use of physical force, deportation is likely to induce political contestation because these state interventions run up against the most fundamental interests of the individuals they target. As a result, both the legislation and implementation of deportation present formidable challenges to the state. The book examines the politics of deportation as it evolves across the policy cycle, beginning with anti-immigrant populist backlash and ending in the expulsion of migrants by deportation bureaucrats. It reveals striking differences in the nature of state capacity not only between the United States and Germany, but also between the policy stages of legislation and implementation.

Read an excerpt from States Against Migrants, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Barron's "People Are Unappealing"

Sara Barron's work has appeared on Showtime’s This American Life, National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, and the Today show, and at the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen, Colorado.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, People Are Unappealing: True Stories of Our Collective Capacity to Irritate and Annoy, and reported the following:

My book, People Are Unappealing: True Stories of Our Collective Capacity to Irritate and Annoy, chronicles my Midwestern adolescent misadventures in its first half: writing a 50-page porn by age eleven (“He humped me wildly with his wiener!”), masturbating my way into a wrist brace, appearing on The Jerry Springer Show. Also, there’s a bit about how in 1992 I sprouted a faint but discernable mustache. The second half details my move to New York City and subsequent failure at many, many things: actor, singer, dancer, retailer, less chronic masturbator. And poet. And spoken word poet.

Page 99 of People Are Unappealing is part of a larger chapter called “Non-Equity” about the aforementioned failures at acting: it’s August of 2001, my wonderfully supportive, wonderfully naïve parents have written the last check to pay for my six-figure B.F.A., and the job I score – not that there’s anything wrong with this – is that of Professional Shirt-Folder and Occasional Windex-er at Banana Republic. I work the late shift, four to eleven, so I can be free to audition during the day.

I studied acting for four years at the university level and received a B.F.A.. That stands for Bachelors of Fine Arts to most, but my mother’s favorite joke was that it stood instead for Big Fucking Actor. “Look who it is!” she’d say when I’d fly home to Chicago to visit, “my Big Fucking Actor of a daughter!” My stock response was ‘very funny,’ to which she’d reply, “Well, I thought we ought to laugh instead of cry about it.”

‘It’ was the hour of reckoning: I had my B.F.A., my memorized monologue. I’d re-soled my jazz shoes and purchased a beret. It was time to scrap the ‘student’ portion from my title and graduate to ‘Actor.’

Ever watch TV or see a movie? If so, perhaps you’ve noticed acting as a career path for the physically attractive. Some of the beauties can act to boot, but first and foremost they’re oddly and unfairly pretty. On the attractiveness scale from 1 to 10, these girls are 10s. Conversely, I was not. I’m not gratuitously self-deprecating, I’m just being realistic. Sporting a F.U.P.A. and faint wisps of back hair, I hung just left of center: a 4. Stilettos, a hint of rouge, a nicely tailored dress – these devices inched me towards a 5; a 6 at best. But you wouldn’t stop me on the street to say, “You ought to be in pictures!”

For those not in the know, FUPA is an acronym for Fat Upper Pussy Area.

Pass it around.

Besides that: I’ll hop on board with Ford’s hypothesis; I think my page 99 works well as an appropriate measure of the book as a whole. The strongest jokes might not be here, but my preoccupation with the idea that someone’s lack of self-awareness is a key component to his/her downfall – that a sad hilarity results when deluded expectations get a smack-down – this, I think, gets touched upon.

Learn more about the book and author at Sara Barron's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Ayres' "Death by Leisure"

Chris Ayres joined The Times (London) in 1997 and has since been posted in New York, Los Angeles, and Iraq. The latter stint inspired his first book, War Reporting for Cowards.

He now writes from Los Angeles for The Times while contributing occasional columns to the Los Angeles Times. His work has also recently appeared in Forbes, Conde Nast Traveller, and Playboy.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale, and reported the following:

Having relocated from a sheep farming village in Northern England to Los Angeles—to take up a job as Hollywood correspondent for The Times of London—I have moved into a gaudy eighties-vintage apartment complex named ‘The Leisureplex’ and embarked upon a scheme to use borrowed money to impress the local women.

The scheme isn’t working, even after I spent $5,000 on an ill-advised bribe to get myself (and my unimpressed date) into Michael Jackson’s 45^th birthday party at Neverland ranch. Still, I’m persevering—although I’m already beginning to suspect that there might be some serious consequences to the instant self-gratification made possible by the Bush/Greenspan credit bubble.

Page 99 finds me once again trying to raise the stakes (I’ll do a lot more of this before the book is done) having just taken delivery of that ubiquitous status symbol of the mid-2000s: a plasma TV “big enough to beam messages to extraterrestrials”. Meanwhile, LA’s infamous Santa Ana winds are raging, and the catastrophic 2003 Cedar Fire is beginning to take hold, a natural (or perhaps unnatural) disaster that I will go on to experience first-hand.

“Sweating, stripped to my boxers, and matted with dust from lying on the floor, I finally located the ON button," I write, having just hooked-up the TV. "I will say this: the picture is dramatically different than that of my old TV. For example, it’s a lot bigger. Tuned to CNN, I can now see every pixel in Larry King’s face. The manual tells me that if I want to make the pixels smaller—and the picture sharper—I will need to buy a new high-definition receiver and a new high-definition cable subscription. And then, after I acquired both of these things, I will need to buy a new high-definition TV.

"Say what you want about obsolescence, but it doesn’t waste any time these days.”

Learn more about the book and author at Chris Ayres' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Kushner's "Levittown"

David Kushner is the author of Masters of Doom and Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Wired, he has also been published in the New York Times, New York, Entertainment Weekly, Parade, Salon, and the Village Voice. He does commentary for NPR, and teaches journalism at New York University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Levittown: Two Extraordinary Families, One Ruthless Tycoon, and the Fight for the American Dream, and reported the following:

Levittown is about the dark side of the American Dream. It tells the true story behind the iconic suburb's whites-only policy - and the two families who challenged the builder's plan during the explosive summer of 1957.

Flipping to page 99, it seems Ford Madox Ford's statement might be right after all. The first two words on the page are "shattered window." I find that amazing, because it really does cut to the heart of the story.

The phrase comes at the moment when Levittown, Pennsylvania's first African-American family, the Myerses, came home to find a rock thrown through their front window. A mob had shown up on the day they moved in, and some attacked the home. In another sense, the "shattered window" suggests the shattering of this picture perfect dreamtown. But there's more. John Keats wrote a famous satire of a Levittown style community - the name of the book, The Crack in the Picture Window.

Further down page 99, however, there's the other key part of the Levittown story. It's not just about evil and hate. It's about the remaking of this model town. The page ends with the Myers' neighbors, the Wechslers, showing up with others to help them.

Learn more about the book and author at David Kushner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Reader's "Potato"

John Reader is a writer and photojournalist who holds an honorary research fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. He has travelled all over the world and now resides in Surrey, UK.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent, and reported the following:

The Spanish conquistadores had overthrown the Incas in 1532 and sent vast quantities of gold and silver back to Europe. But arguably the most valuable item they discovered was an odd-looking esculent that grew in the high Andes – the potato. Page 99 of Potato - a history of the propitious esculent comes at the beginning of a chapter which tells the story of how insecure Europe's food supply had been before the arrival of the potato:

July was the cruellest month, when the grass stood high in the meadows, demanding to be cut and dried and stacked before a turn in the weather spoiled it. Haymaking was the first great harvest of the year – but to feed livestock during the winter, not haymakers at midsummer. People toiling in the hayfields were hungry, burning up at least 3,000 calories a day at the time of year when their available supplies of energy-packed carbohydrates were lowest. The store of last year’s harvest was nearly finished – if there was any left at all – and crops planted in the spring would not be ready to reap for weeks yet. Thus, summer was not a sunblest romp for the rural majority in sixteenth century Europe – it was ‘the hungry gap,’ when people worked hardest and ate least, and many were starving if last year’s harvest had been poor. Brueghel painted hayfield scenes of bucolic fun. Midsummer madness? Perhaps, though as likely induced by the lightheadedness of starvation as by the excesses of consumption.

The potato is a supremely productive and reliable crop. It will thrive on land and in weather where grain would fail; output per unit of land and labour is four times that of grain; three-quarters of its biomass is edible, compared with one-third of grain; it is easily prepared and - most important of all - highly nutritious.

The potato filled Europe's hungry gap and fuelled a burst of population wherever it became a staple food. In due course, the city-based industrial revolution not only mopped up surplus rural populations but also fed the labouring masses on potatoes. As the renowned historian, William H. McNeill, wrote: 'the potato changed the world's history'. It is not even mentioned on page 99, but the context is clear. Read on …

Read an excerpt from Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent, and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

Check out John Reader's top 10 potato books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kitty Burns Florey's "Script and Scribble"

Kitty Burns Florey is the author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences. A veteran copy editor, she has also written nine novels and many short stories and essays.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, and reported the following:

I have a great fondness for Ford Madox Ford: I read The Good Soldier in a college literature course when I was a sophomore, and went on to read not only his tetralogy but minor works like his travel book Provence. I liked his funny name and his funny moustache, too.

So I feel bad that my new book, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, fails his “page ninety-nine” test.

In my book, page ninety-nine turns up in the chapter on the pseudoscience of handwriting analysis known as graphology – a chapter that’s a digression from what the book is really about. Fun, I hope, but still a definite bend in the road.

On page ninety-nine are the signatures of three American writers of the mid-nineteenth century, and they are there to illustrate Edgar Allen Poe’s proto-graphological belief that by their scripts ye shall know them. As page ninety-nine puts it:

It’s probably no coincidence that the writers he approved of had – in his sometimes eccentric opinion – admirable handwriting, and the ones he considered shams couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag.

William Cullen Bryant, for instance, is cursed with “one of the most commonplace clerk’s hands which we ever encountered..., what mercantile men and professional penmen call a fair hand, but what artists would term an abominable one.”

Poor old Ralph Waldo Emerson, who “belongs to a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever – the mystics for mysticism’s sake,” writes a “bad, sprawling, illegible and irregular” hand.

On the other hand, in the handwriting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (he has “first place among the poets of America”), Poe sees “plain indications of the force, vigor, and glowing richness of his literary style.”

If only Ford had recommended page eighty-nine, on which appears a rather dashing 1940 photograph of my father, a footnote about how he used to make pancakes for me and my friends shaped like our initials, and an instructive bit of the handwriting of a left-handed old school chum of mine. Or page nineteen, on which appears a quote from Oscar Wilde (“The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young”) as a sample of my own wretched penmanship before it was reformed in the course of writing this book. Even page one hundred nineteen, which, while it doesn’t sport an exciting illustration, is the beginning of my plea (and this is what the book is really about) that we not lose the ability to write with a pen as we gain the ability to type on a keyboard.

But page ninety-nine? Well, Fordie dear, I flunk. But I think you’d like the book anyway!

Read more about Script and Scribble at the publisher's website.

Learn more about the author and her work at Kitty Burns Florey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie Vaughn's "Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand"

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, as well as numerous short stories in various anthologies and magazines. She's also a contributor to the Wild Cards series edited by George R. R. Martin.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to one of her new books, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand doesn't seem very exciting at first glance, which is a terrible thing to say about my own book. Every page should be critical! Riveting! Amazing! I'm not sure it's even representative of the book as a whole, since the Kitty novels tends to fast-paced and action oriented, and this scene is a pause in the action. Dead Man's Hand is a little different than the other books, though. I went into it thinking "screwball comedy." The previous two books were quite dark, and I wanted to lighten things up. Some silly as well as scary things happen throughout. Page 99 is the end of one scene -- Kitty has dinner with her parents -- and the start of another -- Kitty gets ready for her first televised show. It's a domestic, almost mundane scene, with no hint of the supernatural that forms the foundation of the series. And I've decided I like that, and that it is representative. Because what I try to keep emphasizing in the books is that Kitty has to continue dealing with mundane things -- her family, her job -- even though she's a werewolf, and even though this crazy supernatural stuff keeps happening to her.

Read an excerpt from Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand, and learn more about the author and her work at Carrie Vaughn's website, blog, MySpace page, and Facebook page.

The Page 99 Test: Kitty and the Silver Bullet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly Haskell's "Frankly, My Dear"

Molly Haskell is the author of From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies and the memoir Love and Other Infectious Diseases.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited (part of the Yale University Press’s American Icon series), and reported the following:

I consider Scarlett O’Hara one of the most original and unusual characters ever to grace the page of an American novel, or, as played by Vivien Leigh, the American screen. So wicked (she steals her sister’s fiance, marries three men she doesn’t love, lies, cheats and runs roughshod over Christian and ladylike niceties); yet so courageous, resourceful, blunt and impatient with the pious mythologies of Southern paternalism. Hateful yet curiously forgiveable. And finally, though punished by rejection and loss, she doesn’t suffer the usual retribution dished out to wicked women: penance and transformation! Where did she come from?

One of the themes of my book, which deals with both the 1936 novel and the 1939 movie of Gone with the Wind, is an exploration of her roots in Margaret Mitchell’s life and divided psyche (divided, that is, between good-girl Melanie and renegade Scarlett). And I look at possible external sources, in film and literature. Page 99 is part of a discussion of the similarities and differences between Scarlett and Becky Sharp, Thackeray’s great Victorian adventuress whom contemporary reviewers saw as Mitchell’s inspiration. The Southern novelist denied any such kinship, saying she’d never read the novel. But she wasn’t always to be trusted in such matters, especially as she lived in terror of accusations of plagiarism. Whether or not she’d read Thackeray, she created a unique heroine, a bad-girl beauty, who has kept her edge for three-quarters of a century.

Read an excerpt from Frankly, My Dear, and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

Visit Molly Haskell's website.

Read about Molly Haskell's list of the five best autobiographies by actresses.

--Marshal Zeringue