David Igler's "The Great Ocean"

David Igler is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 and The Human Tradition in California.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush, and reported the following:

It’s a good thing that Ford Madox Ford did not make his test based on page 98, which is left blank in The Great Ocean. I might have had nothing to say at all. Instead, page 99 opens a chapter titled “The Great Hunt” and it begins with one of my favorite lines in the entire book: “Tiger, 1845-1848. Like many whaling voyages, this one involved a fair measure of human bloodshed and an enormous amount of blubber.” The Tiger was a whale ship out of Stonington, Connecticut, and alongside the various crewmembers (who spent almost three years killing whales in the Pacific Ocean) was the captain’s wife, Mary Brewster, who kept a superb journal of the voyage. I use her experiences and observations as a narrative device for much of the chapter. It was a true pleasure to have such an articulate voice for the exceedingly grim subject matter of whaling.

This chapter of The Great Ocean focuses on whaling as well as the wholesale slaughter of other Pacific marine mammals during the early 19th century. The book, however, is a broader history of the Pacific Ocean from the 1770s to the 1840s. Structured thematically rather than chronologically, the chapters deal with exploration, trade, the introduction of diseases to indigenous populations, the taking of captives, the work of trained scientific naturalists, and of course, the “Great Hunt” for marine mammals. As much as anything else, it’s a history of what happens when Pacific indigenous groups encounter foreigners (mostly Europeans and Americans). Diseases decimate many native populations. Atlantic-based empires extend their power into the Pacific. Violence in its many forms is rampant throughout the Pacific.

And Mary Brewster directly observes some of this violence. She watches from the Tiger’s deck as a young man name John Perkins (also introduced on page 99!) is crushed by the tail of whale. Weeks later she witnesses the first whales taken by the ship’s crew and describes the killing, the “cutting in” process, and the arduous “boiling down” of blubber into whale oil. Months after that the Tiger arrives in a small bay on the coast of Baja California, and Mary sees men killed by whales as well as many, many gray whales slaughtered while they attempt to protect their newborn calves. If not quite a Herman Melville, Mary Brewster is certainly a capable narrator for this heyday of whaling in the Pacific Ocean.

No single page can encapsulate an entire book, but page 99 (and the chapter it opens) certainly invites a conversation about the Pacific Ocean and the American demand for various natural resources, including blubber.

Excerpt from page 99 of The Great Ocean:

Tiger, 1845-1848. Like many whaling voyages, this one involved a fair measure of human bloodshed and an enormous amount of blubber. The profitable cargo at the journey’s end delighted Captain William E. Brewster, but his wife, Mary, expressed no particular sentiment as the Tiger entered the harbor of Stonington, Connecticut, on March 8, 1848. “We went in so quickly and so still—We soon left our old home [the Tiger] and found our friends all well—and glad to see us,” she wrote in her journal. Mary Brewster had certainly anticipated this homecoming for well over two years. She was now a seasoned voyager, a “sister sailor” who experienced the extremes of oceanic conditions and witnessed the gruesome business of whaling as well as the depravity of masculine behavior aboard ship. Very little could now startle this twenty-five-year-old woman, and perhaps this explains her lack of sentiment. It had been a long voyage.

Two years earlier the Tiger entered the Pacific with a typical complement of experienced officers, skilled tradesmen and harpooners, and novice crewmen who signed on with varying degrees of willingness. Headed for the Northwest Coast of North America and planning to hunt sperm whales on the way up the South American coast, the Tiger’s crew was notably unsuccessful through the spring of 1846. Some crewmembers quietly spoke of deserting the ship at the first opportunity. There was “not very good feeling between the officers and boatsteerers,” noted John Perkins, a Yale College dropout and twenty-year-old green-hand sailor. Mary Brewster only made matters worse: a woman’s mere presence on the ship, Perkins alleged, turned “every danger double.” The Tiger’s whaleboats chased numerous whales in the southeast Pacific but came up empty, forcing the captain to report “clean”—the whalemen’s term for “no oil”—during a stopover in Hawai‘i.

Learn more about The Great Ocean at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Doherty's "Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939"

Thomas Doherty is a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University. His books include Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture, and Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, and reported the following:

Damned if Ford Madox Ford ain't right: page 99 of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 is a fair sampling of the other 428 pages. The book is about the ways Hollywood mediated Nazism in the 1930s, both as an ideology and a business-- how the motion picture industry depicted Nazism on screen (or more usually avoided doing so) and how the studios reacted to a once reliable overseas business partner suddenly gone pathological. It ends where most books on Hollywood and Nazism begin, with World War II.

The page in question comes from a chapter on the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League of the Motion Picture Industry (HANL), the white-hot center for Popular Front activism in the company town during the Great Depression. Here's a representative passage:

Not least, [the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League] pioneered the celebrity-centric, pseudo-eventful tactics that have since become commonplace for progressive causes that grip the social conscience of famous entertainers: the deployment of star power to publicize and validate a political agenda, with the body of the celebrity dangled as bait. While flashbulbs popped and cameras whirred, HANL stage-managed events where stars presided over rallies, orated from the podium, pled for donations, and signed petitions. If near enough to a famous face, a placard or slogan might avoid being cropped from a syndicated wire photo.

HANL was the group that set the agenda for the cadre who would later ruefully dub themselves "premature anti-Fascists." The outfit was co-founded in 1936 by MGM screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, a secret member of the Communist Party USA, and Dorothy Parker, the famed wit and screenwriter, but it was in many ways the brainchild of a mysterious former member of the German Communist Party named Otto Katz. Many of the directors, screenwriters, and actors who later ran afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the late 1940s and early 1950s were involved with HANL, including the Hollywood Ten.

Conservative historians would later label HANL a "communist front group" and, to be sure, communists were animating founders and active members. Yet HANL attracted a remarkably broad spectrum of support from standard-issue liberals, conservative Catholics, and hard-nosed moguls, all of whom had good reason to oppose Nazism.

However, at the height of its influence and prestige, the local arm of the Popular Front suddenly become far less popular after the announcement on August 23, 1939 of the Soviet-German Non Aggression Pact, the accommodation that gave the green light for World War II. The news hit the stateside Popular Front like a lightning bolt-- forever shattering the alliance of convenience between men and women of the Left. The party liners hastily fell in line with the new party line: the committed interventionists became anti-interventionists, the ardent warriors ardent pacifists, and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League re-branded itself as the Hollywood League for Democratic Action.

Shocked by the sudden switch in loyalties, the authentic liberals bolted from HANL. Membership dwindled and soon the group fizzled out. (Predictably, in June 1941, when the Nazis invaded Russia, the Hollywood party liners reversed themselves again and called anew for the policies they had opposed in the 1939-1941 interim.)

Learn more about Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colin G. Calloway's "Pen and Ink Witchcraft"

Colin G. Calloway is Professor of Native American Studies and John Kimball Jr. Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His books include One Vast Winter Count: The American West before Lewis and Clark, for which he won the Merle Curti Award and the Ray Allen Billington Prize, The Shawnees and the War for America, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America, and New Worlds for All. He recently won the 2011 American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History, and reported the following:

As it happens, Pen and Ink Witchcraft does pass the page 99 test. Page 99 contains the following statement:

The power dynamics that had produced the intercultural diplomacy of the colonial era were changing. Americans were eager to expand and impatient with long-winded protocols that allowed all parties ample time for reflection and discussion. As American power increased, respect for Indian customs and concerns diminished and long-standing practices and rituals of reciprocity eroded. More and more often, treaties were conducted on American terms and by American schedules. Treaties established boundaries but the boundaries became ever more permeable and impermanent.

The book examines the development of Indian treaty making and how negotiations were conducted. It focuses on three major treaties as case studies that not only illustrate how treaties were made, by whom, and why but that also trace how treaty making changed over time, from early colonial treaties where Indian forms and rituals shaped a new American diplomacy, to treaties in the early US that primarily targeted Indian land, then removed Indian peoples to the West, and finally to treaties that confined Indian peoples in the West. The statement on page 99 pretty well reflects the story.

Learn more about Pen and Ink Witchcraft at the Oxford University Press website.

Also see: Colin G. Calloway's five top books on Native Americans and colonizers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Anthes's "Frankenstein’s Cat"

Emily Anthes is a science journalist and author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Psychology Today, BBC Future, SEED, Discover, Popular Science, Slate, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. Her new book, Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts, was published in March 2013 by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is also the author of the Instant Egghead Guide: The Mind.

Anthes applied the “Page 99 Test” to Frankenstein’s Cat and reported the following:

Frankenstein’s Cat is an exploration of how biotechnology is shaping the future of animals, and it covers everything from genetic engineering to animal prostheses, from cloning to remote-controlled, cyborg critters. Page 99 of Frankenstein’s Cat comes toward the end of a chapter about scientists who are trying to use cloning to save endangered species—and even revive extinct ones. (Could there be cloned mammoths and dodos in our future?) It’s a sexy idea—the notion that we can use biotechnology to protect threatened wildlife—but it’s also a hugely controversial one, even among conservation biologists. Page 99 introduces some of their criticisms: “To many biologists, cloning is all sizzle and no substance, a high-tech spectacle that fails to address habitat loss, poaching, pollution, and the other human activities that put wildlife at risk in the first place.”

This debate over whether cloning has a role to play in conservation illustrates a theme that arises repeatedly in Frankenstein’s Cat: Even among those who love animals, there can be—and often is—legitimate disagreement about how best to safeguard their welfare and wellbeing. Biotechnology is giving us profound new power over animal lives and bodies. How should we be deploying these high-tech tools? In short: What does it really mean to be good stewards of this planet and the creatures with whom we share it?

Learn more about the book and author at Emily Anthes's website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Emily Anthes & Milo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek S. Hoff's "The State and the Stork"

Derek S. Hoff is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kansas State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policymaking in U.S. History (University of Chicago Press) and reported the following:

Page 99 of The State and the Stork details the intellectual backdrop of the New Deal’s efforts to relocate rural Americans from “distressed” lands (e.g., the DustBowl of the southern Great Plains) to government-sponsored new towns and “subsistence homesteads.” I became nostalgic when rereading this page because it contains what must be the oldest paragraphs in the book—it’s a good thing MS Word has backwards compatibility! I started out writing a book about American population policies strictly speaking: those related to birth control, immigration, and, in this case, population relocation. But gradually the project morphed into a study of how economists and intellectuals and policymakers—from the colonial era to the 1970s—have thought about the relationship between America’s remarkable population growth and its economy. The book shows how the nation’s current widespread celebration of never-ending population growth is of very recent vintage, dating only from the conservative ascendancy of the 1970s.

Birthrates declined significantly during the 1930s Great Depression, and demographers erroneously predicted that America’s population was headed toward stabilization or even decline. The key idea in chapter 3, which contains page 99, is that disparate commentators welcomed the expected population stabilization. To date, historians have focused on “pronatalist” or pro–population growth arguments of the 1930s, especially famous British economist John Maynard Keynes’s view that population growth would bolster economic confidence and spur recovery. But many articulated what I call “Stable Population Keynesianism”—the idea that a stable population is not only harmless but in fact promotes economic growth and a more equitable society assuming that the state promotes mass consumption.

Page 99 itself is one of those pages that historians write reviewing other people’s work before they reveal their own findings. I describe some well-known desires behind New Deal population-relocation efforts: agricultural crisis and environmental exhaustion; “romantic esteem for the countryside”; the decentralization of industry from city centers to what we now call exurbs; and a desire to help target the worst regional pockets of poverty, for example in Appalachia. But this page also links to the central ideas of The State and the Stork by noting that that we should see resettlement programs as part of a campaign to manage and benefit from the expected end of zero population growth. Historians, I write on page 99, “overlook how New Deal population redistribution also reinforced the prevailing idea that the United States was already sufficiently populated as a whole. Relocation policy was Stable Population Keynesianism in practice.”

Learn more about the book and author at the official The State and the Stork website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Brown's "Plutopia"

Kate Brown is Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the author of A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland, winner of the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize. A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, her work has also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, American Historical Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Harper's Magazine Online.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, and reported the following:

The premise of Plutopia is that the Soviet and American nuclear weapons facilities, though designed to destroy one another, rotated around each other on a common axis. The plutonium plants and cities built alongside them developed in tandem during the Cold War as spies and planners from each country closely watched developments in the other. Page 99 illustrates that connection. It depicts Lavrentii Beria, often described as Stalin’s henchman, but here serving as the efficient and commanding shadow minister of the secret Soviet bomb project. Beria is making a first inspection tour of the plutonium plant site in the remote forests of the southern Russian Urals. Beria’s cement-lined Cadillac has already gotten stuck on the muddy log road into the site and he is not impressed with anything else he sees. At the time, the slow pace of construction of the plutonium plant was braking the whole Soviet Manhattan Project, and Beria had come to speed it up. What he finds sends him into a fury. Not only is the plant nothing more than a swampy pit in the ground, but most of the construction workers were Gulag prisoners, hungry, dressed in rags, and sure, Beria suspected, to give away the secret of the Soviet bomb.

Learn more about Plutopia at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Crane's "Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot"

Peter Crane is Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Professor of Botany at Yale University, and former director of The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot, and reported the following:

There is much that could be said about Ginkgo. It has one of the most fascinating evolutionary and cultural biographies of any tree (the focus of Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot), but perhaps nothing is quite so stark as what comes through in one of the very few diagrams in the book, which just happens to fall on page 99!

On page 99 we see a simple classification of all the plants in the world into just twelve major groups. Just five of these are seed plants: cycads, with about 300 species, conifers with about 600 species, a strange group, the Gnetales, with about 100 species and flowering plants with about 350,000 species. The fifth “group” is Ginkgo - with its single living species Ginkgo biloba. So, in one sense Ginkgo is just one species among a few hundred thousand, but in another equally valid sense this singular species comprises a fifth of the diversity of all living seed plants.

To a botanist Ginkgo is an evolutionary treasure and one that we are fortunate to still have as part of the living world of plants. Once widespread across the planet, Ginkgo almost went extinct during the great Ice Ages and survived as a relic in only two places in China. Since then, and especially over the last 1,000 years, with the help of people, Ginkgo has been renewed. The nuts became a delicacy and were used for oil and in medicine. With its distinctive leaves and great longevity the tree also took on symbolic meaning in Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Shintoism. And in the eighteenth century Ginkgo was introduced from Asia to Europe and North America. In little more that 250 years, Ginkgo has returned to many of the places from which it had once been extinguished.

Today, interest in growing Ginkgo, what it stands for scientifically, and the ways in which it might be useful has never been higher. Ginkgo has become recognized as a valuable street tree and is widely planted in many of the world’s cities. It has also become the source of a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. At the same time it enriches our gardens and our lives. The biography of Ginkgo is a story of resilience and resurgence. It is a tree that people have saved and is a source of hope for other botanical biographies that are still being written.

Learn more about Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jay Ingram's "Fatal Flaws"

Iconic broadcaster Jay Ingram is one of Canada’s best-known and most popular science personalities. Ingram has hosted both the premier radio science program in Canada, CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, and its TV counterpart, Discovery Channel Canada’s Daily Planet. In 2010, Ingram was appointed as a member to the Order of Canada for a lifetime of service in science communication. He has received several awards for his work, including honorary degrees from Carleton University, McGill University, McMaster University, King’s College and the University of Alberta.

A prolific author, Ingram has written 12 books – most recently, Fatal Flaws: How a Misfolded Protein Baffled Scientists and Changed the Way We Look at the Brain – most of which have been best-sellers. His books have been translated into 12 languages.

Since 2005, Ingram has been Chair of the Science Communications Program at the Banff Centre. He is also co-founder of the arts and engineering festival called Beakerhead, beginning in 2013 in Calgary.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Fatal Flaws and reported the following:

Page 99 of Fatal Flaws is an example of the challenges of writing about science, especially science that dwells in dimensions beyond our daily experience. This book is about prions. These disease agents are directly responsible for Mad Cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and many others, but also may hold clues to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. No question prions deserve our attention, but they are mere protein molecules. By contrast, the much more elaborate viruses and bacteria, as micro as they are, can be characterized as malevolent presences equipped with genomes evolved to attack and destroy. They have, to stretch the point a little, personalities.

But a molecule? One whose impact on living things is dependent on its shape? Science writers are familiar with the fact that readers often bring little context to the subject, and that is especially true of biochemistry. Proteins are familiar as the ingredients of muscle-building shakes, not as chains of amino acids folded just so, (or in the case of prions, misfolded).

On page 99 I establish some of that context by using the different qualities of two familiar pieces of clothing, a wool sweater and a silk shirt, to illustrate the differences in the fundamental structure of their respective proteins.

Wool and silk are both proteins, but the way they’re put together is so dramatically different at scales of a trillionth of a meter that you can feel it when you hold them in your hands. Wool is largely arranged as helices, coils of amino acids winding around each other and bonded to other coils. These coils can be stretched, sometimes up to twice their natural length, but they will nonetheless spring back when released. On the other hand, they are not all that strong. Silk is a different story: it is extremely strong because it is arranged, not in coils, but in sheets that are extensively cross-linked for reinforcement. Silk doesn’t stretch nearly as much as wool, nor does it have the same elastic response. Pull on a silk fiber, and it will first resist, then break.

Happily, wool and silk are a perfect pair to contrast, because when the prion protein misfolds into its infectious form, it trades in some of its coils for sheets, altering the structure of the protein dramatically and conferring disease-causing properties upon it.

Learn more about the book and author at Jay Ingram's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick J. Murphy and Ray W. Coye's "Mutiny and Its Bounty"

Patrick J. Murphy is associate professor of management, DePaul University. He is chair of the Management History Division in the Academy of Management. Ray W. Coye is associate professor emeritus of management, DePaul University. The authors each have maritime service backgrounds and seafaring experience.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Mutiny and Its Bounty: Leadership Lessons from the Age of Discovery, and reported the following:

Mutiny and Its Bounty examines mutinies that occurred on seafaring ventures led by Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Sebastian Cabot, and Henry Hudson during the Age of Discovery. We mined voluminous primary sources from these enterprises, which were undertaken 500 years ago, to generate deep insights into how those mutinies occurred. The book’s principal contribution is an illustration of the function of mutiny on those ventures. Unlike today, mutiny was not always seen as bad. To the contrary, it could be good for an enterprise. The best leaders of the era were experts at quelling mutiny or harnessing it for the good of the venture. Today’s entrepreneurs, who are also leading risky ventures into uncertainty, have much to learn from this history.

On page 99, we find a critical juncture in one of the book's richer cases: Cabot's venture for Spain into the Rio de La Plata (April 1526-July 1530). A subsection begins there entitled “The Voyage Home.” It was October 6, 1529, and Cabot had just decided to return to Seville.

When it comes to managing the impressions of people in power for one’s own benefit, few people throughout history can match Sebastian Cabot. He was son of Italian John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) who landed at Newfoundland for England five years after Columbus’s most famous voyage. Using his father’s achievement, Cabot undertook an amazing career that began in England, shifted into Spain, and then back into England, where he re-founded the “Company of Merchant Adventurers” with Henry Hudson’s grandfather.

For the enterprise we find on page 99, Cabot had convinced most of Spain that he was an expert seafarer. His need for achievement compelled him to apply to lead a high-profile venture inspired by Magellan’s circumnavigation a few years earlier. It intended to trace Magellan’s route, cross the Pacific, and draw new charts to safeguard Spain’s claims in the Spice Islands. However, Cabot’s actual expertise was nothing compared to his ability to influence others. The venture made it halfway down the South American coast, where it entered the Rio de La Plata (between Argentina and Uruguay). There, it fumbled for three years. Whole ships and many members were lost. Mutiny was an omnipresent threat, and Cabot’s steps taken to remain as leader were breathtaking even by the standards of the time. History caught up with him back in Seville, but he soon fled to England, where he again became famous.

Learn more about Mutiny and Its Bounty at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek Sayer's "Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century"

Derek Sayer is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University and a former Canada Research Chair at the University of Alberta. His books include The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History and Capitalism and Modernity. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Sayer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, and reported the following:

Walter Benjamin dubbed Paris "the capital of the nineteenth century." My book nominates Prague as a capital for the much darker twentieth century. Located at the crossroads of democratic, fascist, and communist visions of the modern, twentieth-century, Prague was a city where the idling flâneur might reveal himself to be a secret policeman at the drop of a hat.

Page 99 closes a discussion of Vyšehrad, the seat of the city's mythical founder Princess Libuše, whose cemetery was turned into a "national" resting place for Czech writers, artists, and composers after 1861. I draw on one of Milan Kundera's essays to suggest that the "warm, watchful intimacy" of the cemetery is double-edged. In representing the nation as a family it excludes not only Bohemian Germans—who were expelled from the country after 1945—but also prodigal sons like Leoš Janáček (whose modernist music made him what Kundera calls an "internal exile") and Kundera himself, who has lived in France since 1975. Exile—and the complications of identity it brings—has been a recurrent element in Czech modernity. Ferdinand Peroutka, a prominent liberal journalist between the wars, spent World War II in German concentration camps and died in 1978 in the United States. His body was exhumed, flown home, and reburied in Vyšehrad in 1991. But no less grotesque are Vyšehrad's empty graves, like Milada Horáková or Josef Čapek's. A cubist painter (who incidentally gave the world the word “robot”), Čapek perished in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

So yes, page 99 does give a flavor of some of the book's themes—the ironies and surrealities of modernity as exemplified in Prague's fractured twentieth-century history—as well as of its style. I build my narrative through a montage of details like these—places, people, buildings, street names, statues, paintings, operas. Missing from page 99, though, is any mention of the fact that between the wars, when Prague was the capital of Europe's most easterly democracy, it was a hotbed of artistic and architectural modernism and a center of surrealism second only to Paris. That is a story I tell, too—and for the first time in such detail in English.

From page 99:

[Vyšehrad Cemetery] materializes that warm, watchful intimacy in both its comforting presences and its spiteful absences. Kundera himself is unlikely to find rest in the Slavín, even if his claims to a Nobel Prize would be considered by many to be at least as good as those of Jaroslav Seifert. He is doubly unpopular, and doubly envied, among his compatriots: having first flourished as the literary golden boy of the 1968 Prague Spring, he went on to mint international celebrity out of the miseries of the land he abandoned when things turned sour. Not that Kundera would relish spending eternity among the whole company of our great minds anyway. He has been writing in French―the ultimate sacrilege in a nation whose language has been justly described as its “cathedral and fortress”―since 1990.

Ferdinand Peroutka found his way back to Vyšehrad from New York, where he had died in 1978, only in 1991. The former editor of Přítomnost took the long route home, spending World War II in Dachau and Buchenwald and the last thirty years of his life in the United States, where he found refuge after Victorious February. During his American exile Peroutka provided over 1,500 commentaries for Radio Free Europe. One of them, dating from 1956, drew a connection, unthinkable to many at the time―or since―between the postwar “transfer” of Czechoslovakia’s three million “Germans” and other forms of “life without rights or law” in the Czech Lands. “If it is possible to condemn a person for the fact that he belongs to a certain nation,” he wrote, “then it is also possible that he will later be condemned for belonging to a certain social class or political party.” Likely he had in mind, among many others, the National Socialist parliamentary deputy Milada Horáková, who was hanged in Pankrác Prison after the first great Czechoslovak communist show trial in 1950. Horáková, too, now has a place among the company of our great minds. A metaphorical place, that is: where her body disappeared to remains a mystery. Her gravestone was nevertheless placed in Vyšehrad in 1991 with the inscription “executed, but not buried.” Such substitutions of the signifier for the signified were not without historical precedent:

Here would have been buried Josef Čapek, painter and poet

Grave far away

18 23/3 87 19 -/4 45

Learn more about Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue