Susan Nance's "Entertaining Elephants"

Susan Nance is Associate Professor of US History at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and affiliated faculty of the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Entertaining Elephants is actually a pretty honest snapshot of the book as a whole. It discusses the ways nineteenth-century circus audiences were turned off by performances of trained horses and dogs in which spectators could see fear or discomfort in the animal performers. And it goes on to discuss industry wisdom about artistic reasons for not terrorizing one's dog and horse performers, even if many people ignored that wisdom.

I'm pretty proud of this page because it exposes the complex, technical production of trained animal acts for us to really scrutinize. One of my main goals for the book was to peel off all the circus glamour and mystery in order to convey the actual, often miserable and exhausting, lived experience of circus people and circus elephants in order to problematize it. So, I needed to document the day to day hands-on management of elephants in American circuses and use it as a case study of human attitudes toward and uses of animals in the 19th century United States more broadly. I employed horse and dog examples here and there to connect with the reader's experiences of living animals in their own lives (such as I guess it to be) and make the elephants I document hopefully less incomprehensible. Equally important, I was determined to show how animals experienced human activity and how human and nonhuman behaviour consequently existed in symbiosis. So, my discussion of squealing horses and cringing dogs, and the audiences made angry by them, is right on point. That is, it answers the big and provocative question I impose on the historical profession with the book: Does animal experience matter to history? My answer: yes, yes, yes. The page also gets across why elephants were a special case, which is something I had in mind on every page. In this instance, the issue was that elephants didn't show pain, fear or other discomfort in ways audiences could read. Most Americans, who might know how to read horse or dog behaviour in that way, had no idea that the elephants they saw were often completely broken down mentally or in terrible health. And circuses banked on that fact for many decades.

Learn more about the book and author at Susan Nance's website.

Writers Read: Susan Nance.

--Marshal Zeringue

William B. Irvine's "A Slap in the Face"

William B. Irvine is Professor of Philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. His books include On Desire: Why We Want What We Want and A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.

Irvine applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt--And Why They Shouldn't, and reported the following:

On page 99 of A Slap in the Face, the following sentence appears: “To understand the pain-causing potential of insults, we need to appreciate the extent to which humans are social animals.” As the book elsewhere explains, we humans are in a bind. Deprive us of human contact, and we wither emotionally. Surround us with people, though, and we expose ourselves to the stresses caused by social interactions.

One source of stress is the insults those around us will likely direct our way. Some of their insults will be blatant, but most will be subtle. Indeed, people might even use praise to insult us. A woman, for example, might tell her friend that the dress the friend is wearing “does a wonderful job of hiding those bulges.”

The reason people insult us—and we insult them in return—is because we are playing what I call the social-hierarchy game. Thanks to our evolutionary past, we are programmed to care very much about what others think of us. It feels wonderful when they admire and defer to us, and it feels even better when they envy us. It feels bad, though, when they seem to look down on us, socially speaking, and it feels even worse when they provoke our envy. It is a recipe for human misery.

There is, however, a way out of this predicament: we need only withdraw from the social-hierarchy game. Do this, and not only will the insults others direct at us lose their sting, but we will become less likely to inflict insults on them. Do this, and our consumer behavior will change, since we will no longer feel compelled to buy status objects. And finally, do this, and our relationships will become more meaningful, since other people will start thinking of us as allies rather than social rivals.

In A Slap in the Face, I have much to say about insults, the social role they play, and the psychology that lurks behind them. I also describe my own attempt—which I regard as largely but not entirely successful—to withdraw from it.

Learn more about the author and his work at William B. Irvine's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Guide to the Good Life.

Writers Read: William B. Irvine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven E. Harris's "Communism on Tomorrow Street"

Steven E. Harris is an associate professor of history at the University of Mary Washington. He was a research scholar at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute in 2003–2004.

Harris applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin, and reported the following:

In Communism on Tomorrow Street, I explore Khrushchev’s mass housing campaign in the 1950s and 1960s, and how Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded, communal apartments they had inhabited under Stalin into new, single-family apartments in five-story, prefab structures. Page 99 of my book draws a few conclusions about how ordinary people participated in this massive project and complicates the picture about what they and Khrushchev’s regime actually got out of it. First, despite its efforts to create a modern building industry based on standardized designs and prefabricated production that could go toe-to-toe against building programs in the West (think Levittown in the US), Khrushchev’s regime still depended heavily on individual Soviet citizens and their families to build their own, free-standing housing in smaller cities or even to participate without any training in the construction of their own mass housing apartment buildings. So while Khrushchev’s regime hoped the campaign would serve as a fine example of Soviet industrialization on the road to its version of modernity, it often had to rely on make shift methods of construction and even single-family structures built by Soviet citizens themselves. But this was not only a story of shortcomings. As I argue throughout my book, unlike past industrial and political campaigns under Stalin that relied on coercion to get things done and often resulted in mass death, Soviet citizens who helped out Khrushchev’s regime in the building program, in which mass death was avoided, did so enthusiastically for the simple reason that they received better housing on account of their efforts. On the other hand, page 99 also shows that the move to the separate apartment wasn’t always a sure bet even for families who patiently waited for years on a waiting list. Even official statistics reveal that many citizens just ended up in other communal apartments. For these urban dwellers, Khrushchev’s housing campaign was deeply frustrating and laid bare the arbitrary methods by which the state distributed mass housing. If you’ve read this far into this post and would like to learn more about my book and comment on it, please see my book blog where I’ll be sharing other insights about the research and writing that went into it.

--Marshal Zeringue

Morten Jerven’s "Poor Numbers"

Morten Jerven is assistant professor at Simon Fraser University. He has written for the Foreign Policy and The Guardian, and his research has been covered at BBC and Econtalk. He has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals.

Jerven applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Poor Numbers. How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It, and reported the following:

On page 99 I document an email exchange between me and the IMF Technical Advisor to East Africa. One of the central themes of the book is how development statistics for African countries have been created rather than collected. In this correspondence I asked the IMF Technical Advisor to East Africa how data users should interpret the economic statistics, particularly the GDP figures coming out countries such as Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. The question arose because in 2010 it was announced that GDP figures in Ghana were revised. As a result GDP per capita almost doubled, and Ghana went from being classified as a poor country, to a middle income poor country. I asked whether such revisions could be forthcoming in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania as well, in order to triangulate other information I had collected from national statistical offices that same year.

On page 99 it is recorded that the IMF representative responds that

“I have access to information provided to me on a confidential basis, I am not in a position to answer your request.” I countered that I had already been able to get some information from the World Bank, the UK Department for International Development, NORAD, and the IMF on these issues and explained that “one of the central aims of this study is to demystify the processes behind the production of income and growth statistics in the region. Taking the position that the IMF’s role in this process is ‘confidential’ raises more problems than it solves.”

The IMF advisor kept his ground and did in the end only respond to the request in general terms.

The central concerns regarding African development statistics is that with the current uneven application of methods and poor availability of data, any ranking of countries according to GDP levels is misleading. The book emphasizes the challenges for ‘data users’ in these circumstances and shows how data users, organizations, media and scholars are misled by African development statistics. My crucial point is that GDP data are disseminated through international organizations, but without any detailed data descriptions. Currently, data users are not getting the assistance they need. And the IMF response documented on page 99 in this case is typical.

In my book I used other methods – such as going through the source material and conducting interviews with the national income accountants in the countries that I visited (Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia). In these interviews I mapped the current state of development statistics and documented what is needed to improve on the situation. This system currently causes more confusion than enlightenment, and is dire need of reform.

Poor numbers are too important to be dismissed as just that.

Learn more about Poor Numbers. How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It at the Cornell University Press website, and visit Morten Jerven’s home page for more on the book and his research.

--Marshal Zeringue

Phillip F. Schewe’s "Maverick Genius"

Phillip F. Schewe works at the Joint Quantum Institute, located at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, The Humanist, American Scientist, Physics Today, and Physical Review Letters. He is also a playwright. His previous book, The Grid, a history of how society uses and loses electricity, was named by NPR as one of the science books of the year for 2007.

Schewe’s present book, Maverick Genius, tells the story of the life of Freeman Dyson, a protean scientist-essayist who helped to reinvent quantum science, to design a best-selling nuclear reactor model, to design a nuclear-powered rocket ship used by Stanley Kubrick (at least at first) as the model for the spaceship in 2001, to launch the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (“Dyson Spheres”), to craft the limited nuclear testban treaty of 1963, to keep tactical nuclear weapons out of Vietnam, to invent adaptive optics (now used on most large optical telescopes), to prove the chemical stability of matter, and to introduce field theory into condensed matter physics. Dyson has been a frequent writer for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He won the million dollar Templeton Prize for writing on religion and science.

Schewe applied the “Page 99 Test” to Maverick Genius and reported the following:

Dropping in any page of Maverick Genius, the reader would see Dyson creating something interesting. On page 99 the time is the mid 1950’s, and Dyson is a new professor at the Institute for Advanced Study during the height of nuclear paranoia, which inspired thoughts of nuclear holocaust:

Survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima blasts provide many gripping eyewitness accounts. Works of art, like Doctor Atomic, also vividly portray the general sense of nuclear dread. In the opera’s production on the grand stage of the Metropolitan Opera house, the climax of the story, the nighttime detonation of the “gadget” in the New Mexico desert, comes in the very last moment of the opera. In slow motion, with all the characters leaning in toward the distant explosion, as if to listen in on the revelation of an awful secret, the blast seems to shiver space itself apart and turn darkness into a ball of fire.

The text on page 99 continues with the aftermath of the humiliation of Dyson’s boss, Robert Oppenheimer:

The war was over. Not the Cold War; that would go on for decades. But the war over Oppenheimer was over. His security clearance was revoked and his involvement with government matters ceased. But at least he had not been fired from his post at the Institute. Dyson felt that Oppie, back in Princeton with fewer distractions, was a better director than ever. He met each Tuesday afternoon with senior Institute scientists, and continued with his sharp questioning of seminar speakers.

Freeman Dyson had one of the most prestigious jobs a scientist could have. He was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. The most famous residents at the Institute were physicist Albert Einstein and mathematician Kurt Gödel. Dyson never got to know either man. When Dyson came for the 1948/49 academic year, he didn’t know enough physics and had been too shy to talk to Einstein. Now, coming to the Institute as a professor Dyson knew more physics but generally avoided seeing the man because of Einstein’s outmoded views about quantum mechanics.

Dyson also spoke little with Gödel. It was said that Gödel and Einstein only talked with each other. The ideas Gödel introduced were no less important for mathematics than Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle had been for physics. Gödel demonstrated that within a formal mathematical system with a finite number of rules some logical propositions would exist which could not be proved or disproved by the logical rules of that system. In other words, no finite system of mathematics, no matter how extensive, would ever be satisfactorily complete. This demonstration is now generally called Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. And then, like his friend Einstein, effectively retired from active participation in forefront research.”

Learn more about Maverick Genius at the publisher's website.

My Book, The Movie: Maverick Genius.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Mayers's "FDR's Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis"

David Mayers holds a joint appointment in the History and Political Science departments at Boston University. His books include George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy and The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy.

Mayers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, FDR's Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis: From the Rise of Hitler to the End of World War II, and reported the following:

This book constitutes an investigation into the effects that personality and circumstance had on US foreign policy during World War II. In the book I give an account of US envoys residing in the major belligerent countries--Japan, Germany, Italy, China, France, Great Britain, USSR--and highlight the fascinating role played by such diplomats as Joseph Grew, William Dodd, William Bullitt, Joseph Kennedy, John Winant, and W. Averell Harriman. Between Hitler's 1933 ascent to power and the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, US ambassadors sculpted formal policy--occasionally deliberately, other times inadvertently--giving shape and meaning not always intended by FDR or predicted by his principal advisors. From appeasement to the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War, I examine the complicated interaction between policy, as conceived in Washington, and implementation on the ground in Europe and Asia. By so doing, I also shed needed light on the fragility, ambiguities, and enduring urgency of diplomacy and its crucial function in international politics.

The scene on p. 99 is centered on FDR's man in China, Ambassador Nelson Johnson. The year is 1937, famously associated with the "rape of Nanjing"--that city then serving as Chiang Kai-shek's capital. Johnson was evacuated from Nanjing shortly before the Japanese captured the city and perpetrated their misdeeds upon its civilian inhabitants and defeated Chinese defenders. Although Johnson did not directly witness the occupation of Nanjing, he did experience the city's pre-surrender bombings. These epitomized for him an inhumanity for which the Japanese would ultimately pay. He wrote presciently in September 1937: "Some day the Japanese will regret their senseless bombings of towns for someone will subject them to a similar treatment and the world will be silent for they will have no court into which they can go with dirty hands." Before that dreadful reckoning, Johnson predicted, Japanese forces would become enmeshed in a China war that they could not finish, engaged by guerrillas and regulars that, however ragged, stood a fair chance to drain Tokyo's wealth and morale. In the meantime he argued to FDR and State Department seniors on behalf of generous aid to China, not a line of reasoning persuasive to then dominant isolationists in Washington.

Read an excerpt from FDR's Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Dauphinee's "The Politics of Exile"

Elizabeth Dauphinee is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research interests involve autoethnographic and narrative approaches to international relations, Levinasian ethics and international relations theory, and the philosophy of religion. She has traveled and researched extensively throughout Bosnia and Serbia and spent much time writing in order to bury her own ghosts from those experiences.

Dauphinee applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Politics of Exile, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Politics of Exile is representative of one aspect of the postwar experience of Bosnian Serbs - the reluctant migration of those whose futures and pasts have been shattered by the conflict. As Jelena prepares to depart for Canada with her new husband, Milan, she shares a final coffee with the father of her first love, Luka, who was killed during the war. As they sit together at the kitchen table for what is probably the last time, neither of them suspect that Milan is implicated in Luka’s death. Each in their own way, Milan and Jelena hope that emigrating from Bosnia will help them bury their pasts, but the ghosts and memories follow them into their new lives. This tale and others are interwoven throughout a larger narrative: the relationship between an international politics professor and her Bosnian Serb translator, who is the younger brother of Jelena’s murdered love. The translator seeks his brother’s killer in Canada as the professor learns of his own crimes in the war. The Politics of Exile explores personal and civilizational guilt, displaced and fractured identity, secrets and subterfuge, love and alienation, and the impossibility of ethics.

From Page 99:

…She wanted to run out of there as fast as she could go. But instead, she sat down at the table. And she knew then that she would go to Canada with Milan.

“I will go to Canada with Milan Milanovic´,” she said quietly.

“I know,” old Sokolovic´ nodded. He reached into the pocket of the same sweater that had once held Stojan’s invitation to report for active duty, and withdrew an envelope. He handed it to her across the table, and she saw that it was stuffed with German marks.

“Please don’t, father,” she said to him, embarrassed. “I’ll be alright.”

“No, no,” he insisted, and his voice was hoarse and weak. “Canada is a good state, but you need money.”

“Please, father,” she begged. “Give it to Stojan.”

“There is enough for Stojan,” he said firmly. “This is what is left, and it is for you and Milan.” He pressed the envelope upon her, and she reluctantly accepted it.

“Now drink your coffee,” the old man implored her.

She did, and they sat together in those difficult, painful circumstances, looking at each other and knowing that, if the war had not come, things would be dramatically different. Sokolovic´ sighed, and gave voice to her own thoughts when he said helplessly, “I don’t know what this war was for.”

Jelena was silent. She had never understood what the war was for. All it produced were the dead and disappeared. All of this terrible loss, tides of refugees, hillsides covered with landmines. All of these rumors about concentration camps and rapes.

“We lost, we Serbs, didn’t we?” he asked.

Jelena nodded.

“I lost my son for nothing,” the old man whispered. “We couldn’t hold our own lines.”

“How could they be held against NATO?” she asked in return. “The mood of the world turned against us.” She thought about the things she had heard about what Serbs had done. She thought of Stojan, sitting blankly in the next room.

They looked at one another across the table, and the coffee steamed pleasantly between them.

“Daughter,” Sokolovic´ began, and then hesitated.

She waited for him to go on…

Learn more about The Politics of Exile at the Routledge website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard J. Samuels's "3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan"

Richard J. Samuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the MIT Center for International Studies. He is the author of several award winning books, including: Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia (2007) and Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (2003).

Samuels applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, 3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan, and reported the following:

On March 11, 2011 Japan moved eight feet closer to North America, the earth’s axis shifted, and the world turned upside down for 128 million Japanese. We watched in horror as 20,000 people were washed away by a devastating tsunami just minutes after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake shifted the sea floor off the Tohoku coast in northeastern Japan. And then, in slower motion, we witnessed the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, the displacement of 110,000 residents, and the spread of an invisible radioactive terror across the archipelago. This quake, tsunami, and meltdown — a triple catastrophe with no precedent—is known simply as “3.11."

On page 99, one finds both the central question of the book: “What will (and will not) change?” and its conclusion: “it is too soon after the catastrophe to identify lasting changes.” At this point, the question and answer refer to one piece of the Japanese national fabric-- national security. The book also examines change vis-à-vis energy policy-- particularly the future of nuclear power-- and local governance--the locus of most public policy delivery. In all three areas Japan’s elites competed to control national rhetoric, the “sweet talk” that frames public choices. For some, 3.11 was a warning for Japan to “put it in gear’’ and go in a new direction. For those with more to lose from change, the catastrophe was a once-in-a-millennium “black swan,” so Japan should “stay the course.’’ Still others declared that 3.11 taught a clear lesson--that Japan must return to an idealized past and rebuild what was had been lost to modernity and globalization.

Optimists saw 3.11 as the moment to seize the opportunity to re-energize civil society and enhance transparency in the policy process. The enormity of the tragedy notwithstanding, pessimists insist that 3.11 was not big enough to compel changes to national institutions. There is evidence to support both views, but observers are struck by how inflated many of the grandest predictions were—e.g., that 3.11 would stimulate a “civilizational transformation” or that a new chapter in Japanese history would begin. An insistent flood of extravagant claims dominated the 3.11 discourse, rattling Japanese politics and society. The discourse was filled with reaffirmations of community and social solidarity. But the political world was not “reborn,” nor was national life “reset.” Normalcy prevailed. Japan would not become more muscular, it would not alter its system of local governance, and it would not abandon nuclear power. It was not nudged in a new direction.

Learn more about 3.11 at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Sowle Cahill's "Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics"

Lisa Sowle Cahill received her BA from the Santa Clara University and her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is the J. Donald Monan Professor of Theological Ethics at Boston College.

Cahill applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics, and reported the following:

Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics is a book about religion and politics. It defends Christian action for social change, the positive potential of Christian believers and churches to alleviate global injustices, such as huge gaps between rich and poor, climate change, sex trafficking, and violent civil conflict. The book refutes the notions that Christianity is only about spiritual salvation and an afterlife; that God is present in the Christian religion only; that the rule of international politics is and must be “might makes right;” that the unjust conditions in which the majority of the world’s population lives cannot be changed; and that when religion gets into volatile situations it just inflames conflict and division.

The book bases its case on the figure of Jesus Christ, whose life and message are remembered in the Christian gospels. Christians believe that the risen Jesus is still present in the community of faith. Core to his ministry is Jesus’ preaching of the “kingdom (or reign) of God,” which is in fact a call for more inclusive community, in which sinners, the poor, women, the ill and mentally infirm, and other excluded categories can find acceptance, healing, and hope for the future. Page 99 addresses an important premise of the book’s argument: Jesus himself thought that God’s mighty action at the end of time would definitively overturn the reality of historical evil. Yet Jesus also believed that God is already present in history in a saving way, so that Christian political action can produce real results now.

The cover image of the book captures its message. It is a photo taken by Catholic Relief Services at a camp in Kenya for refugees fleeing violence in Somalia. Three relief workers—two men, one woman; two black, one white; two Christian, one Muslim (the woman wears a headscarf)—stand near a water truck, talking, gesturing, and making plans accommodate the overflow of Somalians. One jots in a notebook. One holds a cell phone. The black man wears a jacket with the CRS logo: a flame with a smaller flame at its center. A flame (or “tongue of fire”) is a New Testament image of the Holy Spirit, sent by the risen Christ to empower the church. Those who struggle for justice out of love of God and neighbor carry on the work of Jesus Christ in the world.

Read an excerpt from Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Goodman’s "Eighty Days"

Matthew Goodman's nonfiction books include The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York and Jewish Food: The World at Table. The recipient of two MacDowell fellowships and one Yaddo fellowship, he has taught creative writing at numerous universities and workshops. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and children.

Goodman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World, and reported the following:

Eighty Days is the true-life story of two young female journalists, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, who each set out from New York on November 14, 1889 to try and beat the around-the-world mark of eighty days set by the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s novel. Nellie Bly sailed east across the Atlantic on the steamship Augusta Victoria; Elizabeth Bisland headed west by train to San Francisco on the New York Central railroad. The race around the world was Bly’s original idea, and she fought to convince the editors of the World newspaper, for which she worked, to let her do it. (In those days, editors didn’t even like their female reporters heading unescorted across the city, much less around the world.) Bisland, on the other hand, had been summoned that very morning to her publisher’s office, where she was summarily informed – against her strong wishes – that she was to leave that very evening on a trip around the world.

On page 99, Elizabeth Bisland is one day out of New York. Still reeling from the shock of the sudden turn her life has taken, she finds herself late at night wandering hungry and alone around the vast, gloomy Union Station in Chicago. This is how the page begins:

She felt, all at once, terribly homesick, so far from the cozy apartment where her sister had by now lit the gas jets and prepared a quiet dinner for herself; she remembered that she hadn’t eaten on the train, and realized that she was very hungry. She passed shuttered newsstands and lunch counters, a waiting room with a few sleepy-looking passengers in it; she could hear her own footsteps echoing in the cavernous hall. On a wing adjoining the main hall a telegraph office was still open: at this hour, a wire back to The Cosmopolitan would do no good. A friendly conductor took pity on her and helped her locate the departure gates for the Rock Island Road, where she would transfer to the train for Omaha, before bidding her, in Bisland’s description, “a commiserating adieu.” Near the waiting area she found a lunch hall that was open late, and she sat on a high stool at the counter and ate a solitary dinner of ham with a cup of tea. Even this seemingly ordinary act was daring in its way: in New York there was only a single restaurant at which it was considered appropriate for respectable women to sit on stools and eat at a counter on which no cloth was spread. That restaurant was located on Broadway near Twenty-first Street, and Elizabeth Bisland, who worked only a few blocks away, surely knew of it, and had likely eaten there on her way to or from the Cosmopolitan offices. Memories of New York would have only exacerbated her sense of loneliness. She was in a nearly deserted train station in a strange city late at night having dinner, unaccountably, by herself. It could not bode well for her trip, she must have pondered, that the magazine had made this mistake at the very first opportunity to do so. As she ate, her every mouthful was regarded with wan interest by the man who oversaw the lunch hall. She finished up her meal and hurried out to the train.

Eighty Days is a work of nonfiction. All of the dialogue in it – and anything else between quotation marks – was taken from a written source such as a memoir, letter, or newspaper article. None of the events described in the book was imagined, and though I worked very hard to present the internal world of the two main characters as well as the external world through which they raced, I did not ascribe any thoughts to any character that he or she did not personally claim. This passage was actually the product of several avenues of research: Elizabeth Bisland’s own account of the race, entitled A Flying Trip Around the World (both she and Bly published books about their journeys, which proved an enormous help); contemporaneous descriptions of Chicago’s Union Depot; and books about women in New York in the late nineteenth century (one of which yielded the detail about the sole restaurant in the city that allowed women to sit on stools and eat at a bare counter).

Still, though all of the details in this book are taken from life, I wanted Eighty Days to have all the suspense, immediacy, and emotional impact of a work of fiction: so that the reader would not just know what happened on that race around the world, but feel it as well. I hoped that in turning to a particular page in the book – such as, for example, page 99 – a reader might not immediately be able to tell whether she was reading a work of history or a novel.

Learn more about the book and author at Matthew Goodman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Eighty Days.

--Marshal Zeringue