Johanna Schoen's "Abortion After Roe"

Johanna Schoen is associate professor of history at Rutgers University and author of Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Abortion after Roe: Abortion after Legalization, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s page 99 test takes us to a place in Abortion After Roe that feels almost preliminary – a discussion about the sense of relief and epiphany abortion providers felt when they established the National Abortion Federation [NAF] in 1977. Four years after the legalization of abortion, NAF brought together a wide assortment of individuals: members of feminist health collectives, owners of for-profit clinics, and abortion providers from diverse backgrounds were joined by researchers, academics, lawyers, and policymakers. While all came together to carve out a future for abortion services now that the procedure was legal, consolidation did not come easy. Feminists wanted abortions to be performed as an act of empowerment and consciousness-raising for women in a non-hierarchical woman-centered setting at the lowest cost possible. Male physician providers hoped to center abortion services in a medical office or clinical setting that emphasized medical safety and professionalism. At odds over the meaning of professionalism and the importance of feminist care, NAF members still came together and established a set of standards with the hope of integrating abortion care into mainstream medicine.

But four decades later, the hopes of abortion providers, that abortion services would be easily accessible, integrated into mainstream medical practice, are far from reality. As Abortion After Roe chronicles, by the 1980s, the rise of a powerful anti-abortion movement determined the shape that abortion care was going to take. As anti-abortion activists redefined abortion as murder and the fetus as a baby, they began to exert an extraordinary influence on the delivery of abortion services, pushing both patients and providers into the defensive. Anti-abortion politics shaped the performance of abortion procedures, and stigmatized abortion services and those who participated in them. Overregulated and forced to practice defensive medicine, abortion providers found it increasingly challenging to offer woman-centered feminist care.

Yet, Abortion After Roe also illustrates how patients and abortion providers pushed back. They educated local and federal law enforcement about harassment and violence against clinics and staff. They pushed for legal protections and the prosecution of violent anti-abortion activists. And they began to articulate a new understanding of reproductive justice that positions abortion care as moral work. Women, too, reclaimed their moral authority to make their own reproductive decisions and speak about abortions as a positive choice. This book does not offer a solution to the abortion debate. But it explains how we ended up at a time when attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and discredit women’s health services regularly resurface and it offers an assessment of the ways in which supporters of reproductive justice might articulate a powerful support for abortion care.

Learn more about Abortion after Roe at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bonnie Lander Johnson's "Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture"

Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow and Lecturer at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture, and reported the following:

Is modern science the bastard child formed in an act of unchastity? The 1663 poem that features on page 99 of Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture suggests that it was. Abraham Cowley’s ode to his friend William Harvey draws on the classical literary tradition of chastity in order to praise the great anatomist as a plunderer of nature’s secrets and a methodological trail-blazer. Harvey’s empiricism was rebellious: the medical establishment at the time focussed on disputation and looked for truth in its philosophical tradition. Instead, Harvey investigated the body on the slab before him. Cowley’s poem describes this new approach as a glorious rape of nature, a conquest of both nature herself and of Harvey’s competitors, who had failed to properly advance upon the truths hidden in the body. The poem goes on to argue that the rape is redeemed because the truth it reveals is God’s design. Cowley’s Harvey may have performed an act of unchastity upon coy nature but ultimately his investigation revealed those truths written on the body by God himself. In an inversion not unlike Donne’s ‘Batter my heart three-person’d God’, the sanctifying revelation enabled by Cowley’s Harvey undercuts the violence of the doctor’s search, turning ravishment into the revelation of God’s truth.

Cowley’s Ode playfully pushes against a number of early modern definitions of, and concerns about, chastity and unchastity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the intersection between medical innovation, theological reform, and representations of chastity (both popular and literary) were numerous. However, the abiding interest in Elizabeth I as chaste icon of the British monarchy has obscured the fact that the decades following her death were crucially concerned with the virtue and how it shaped both private and public life. Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture explores this concern through literature and drama, sermons and political tracts, court ceremonies (including birthing rituals), legal trials, architectural theory, and plague writing. It concludes that chastity was a key consideration in the conflicts that led up to the Civil Wars and shaped the way literary genres were understood.

For those contemporary westerners who do not observe chastity for religious reasons, the virtue has all but faded into obscurity. It is perhaps for this reason that we have forgotten its crucial historical importance. This book seeks to remind its readers that for centuries chastity mattered – not just as a way of personal sanctity, but as political policy, literary trope, medical imperative, and revolutionary force.

Learn more about Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture at the Cambridge University Press website.

Cover story: Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa D. Edwards's "Please Don't Bite the Baby, and Please Don't Chase the Dogs"

Lisa Edwards, CPDT-KA, CDBC, is a professional dog trainer and dog behavior consultant, a Pet Partners evaluator and instructor, and an AKC Canine Good Citizen evaluator. Her book A Dog Named Boo was a London Times bestseller.

Edwards has been training dogs professionally and performing animal-assisted therapy since 1999. She has trained hundreds of therapy dogs and service dogs for veterans and individuals with PTSD. She is the lead trainer and behavior consultant for the Animal Rescue Foundation–Beacon and the Danbury Animal Welfare Society. Edwards also lectures on dog/child safety, runs webinars for Pet Partners, and operates a teaching and consulting business, Three Dogs Training.

Edwards applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Please Don't Bite the Baby (and Please Don't Chase the Dogs): Keeping Our Kids and Our Dogs Safe and Happy Together, and reported the following:

From page 99:

- Some folks like a go-bag. I don’t usually put one together since the things in it might expire by the time I would use it. Instead, I keep all emergency supplies and equipment in the same cabinet so I can easily access what I need or throw it into a bag.

» Dry baby formula or breast pump, many bottles, diapers and diapering supplies, along with multiple changes of clothing for the baby (and you, too—let’s face it, a messy poop can get everywhere), and a few favorite toys to occupy the baby.

» Pet food and medications, feeding and water bowls—one for each pet.

» Leashes, harnesses, and collars. Be sure they fit ahead of time. Depending on your pet, you may also need towels and blankets.

» ID tags with phone numbers, rabies tags, and the rabies certificate. One easy thing to do is make a copy of your pet’s rabies certificate as soon as the vet gives it to you and keep it in the glove compartment of your car. This will come in handy if your dog ever gets lost or picked up by animal control.

- You may want a crate for your dog for a number of reasons. If your dog is small, it will be easier for you, but with bigger dogs that are not friendly to strangers or other dogs, a crate will allow for safe, movable containment. Be sure to think about this ahead of time and ask shelters about crate requirements or restrictions.

» If you cannot all stay together, have a list of boarding facilities in and out of your area in case you must board your pets for the short- or long-term.

Each chapter in Please Don’t Bite the Baby, And Please Don't Chase the Dogs is split between a narrative memoir in the first half and training tips in the second half. Page 99 of Please Don’t Bite the Baby lands in the middle of the tips portion of Chapter Six, Reflections After the Storm, and is somewhat representative of the other tips sections of the book.

While page 99’s tips are primarily an outline of storm preparedness and management strategies for families with pets as it relates to the aftermath of Super Storm Sandy that left us without water, heat and electricity for ten days, the tips sections in other chapters revolve more around training and behavioral advice along with other management and preparedness considerations.

I chose to split Please Don’t Bite the Baby’s chapters into half memoir and half training tips because over the years I have discovered that allowing clients and students to see how the skills and behaviors we are teaching our dogs relate to real-life experiences makes it easier to understand the importance of these skills and motivates the humans to work harder on the training because they can see an applicable useful outcome.

If Page 99 could point back to the narrative section of Chapter Six, it would point to this passage:

Indy weathered the storm better than the dogs…the dogs were already stressed by the sound of the storm and the following confusion. It was difficult to navigate the house with the few lights the portable generator could power and there was no light at all in the yard at night. When power goes out we humans miss all the amenities, but the dogs notice things on a different level. Without electricity, our homes lose their regular hum and many dogs are sensitive to this...

By day seven, Indy’s aunties had their power restored. He and I went to stay there while Lawrence tried to prevent the pipes from freezing by keeping fires going in the fireplace, as he looked after the confused and stressed animals.

Visit Lisa J. Edwards's website.

Writers Read: Lisa Edwards.

Coffee with a Canine: Lisa J. Edwards & Pinball.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft's "Black Germany"

Robbie Aitken is a Senior Lecturer in Imperial History at Sheffield Hallam University. Eve Rosenhaft is Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their book, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960, and reported the following:

The ‘test’ got it just right: page 99 of Black Germany introduces one of the many personal stories and micro-histories through which we recount ‘the making and unmaking of a diaspora community’ in Germany.

The German Empire acquired colonies in Africa in the 1880s, and lost those colonies after being defeated in World War I. During those decades, Africans (mainly young men) began to travel to Germany, and some of them settled there, marrying white Germans. Had Germany continued to be a colonial power after 1919, those settlers would probably have become the founder generation of a growing Afro-German population fed by new arrivals and building its own community institutions – as happened in twentieth-century France and Britain. In fact, the enforced end of Germany’s colonial empire closed off this possibility in two ways: Travel from Africa to Germany largely ceased, while German Africans and their children entered into a kind of political limbo – no longer colonial subjects but not citizens either. At the same time, the loss of colonies under the Versailles Treaty fuelled a politics of national resentment which culminated in the Nazi takeover of power. Under National Socialism, black people and their ‘mixed-race’ children were formally named as racial aliens. They were subject to various forms of exclusion and harassment; most traumatically, young men and women of the German-born generation became victims of forced sterilisation.

Black Germany traces this development by following the careers of a generation of travellers from the German colonies. We examine the conditions of their arrival, work and family life. We also explore their associational life and political activity, and the forms of personal and international solidarity with which they responded to the Nazi threat. Our focus is on the ways individuals and their experiences exemplify historical processes.
On page 99, we begin to tell the story of Johannes Kohl, an African who arrived as a child in 1904, and his efforts to gain custody of his son who had been abandoned by his white mother. Here, Kohl’s story helps to illustrate the problem of uncertain civic status and the ways in which questions of citizenship and race interacted at the point where Africans sought to build families in Germany. The story ends in a later chapter, with the death of Kohl’s (now teenage) son in care under the Nazi regime.

Learn more about Black Germany at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham's "Inside the Politics of Self-Determination"

Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham is an Associate Professor at the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland. She is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego and has been a Fulbright Scholar and a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Her book Inside the Politics of Self-determination received the Book of the Year award from the British Conflict Research Society.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Inside the Politics of Self-determination and reported the following:

Page 99 concludes the chapter on accommodation of groups seeking greater self-determination (SD). This is the most interesting part of the book for me because these pages answer the motivating question for the entire research project: Why do some groups get accommodated while others do not? This puzzle, in turn, led me to examine why some self-determination groups fight civil wars against their states and why some groups are plagued in infighting. I write on page 99,

Politics within SD groups is characterized by unstructured competition where SD group factions can act independently of one another, and this competition creates a significant degree of uncertainty for the state about what the group might settle for. Yet, multiple internal factions in a SD group also provide states with an incentive and opportunity to use concessions to reveal information (thus reducing uncertainty) and to bolster moderates.

This quote highlights two of the central claims of the book. First, internal competition among factions in nationalist (or other opposition) groups provide both opportunities and challenges for conflict management. States and international actors can pick specific factions to work with, giving them potential partners in the management of disputes. Yet, individual factions often have trouble generating credibility and warding off challenges from within their own group, complicating efforts to fully resolve disputes.

Second, accommodation is not just the conclusion of a dispute; it can also be used strategically to shape the challenges that states must overcome. When faced with multi-faceted social movements, states can use concessions to bolster moderate factions. Page 99 ends with a summary of the global statistical analyses and qualitative case evidence from India. This data further supports the argument that internally divided SD groups are more likely to get accommodation than those presenting a more coherent challenge to the state.

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Appelbaum's "St. Francis of America"

Patricia Appelbaum, an independent scholar of religion and American culture, is author of Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era. Her new book is St. Francis of America: How a Thirteenth-Century Friar Became America's Most Popular Saint.

Appelbaum applied the “Page 99 Test”—Is Ford Madox Ford’s statement “Open the book to page 99 and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you,” accurate for your book?—to St. Francis of America and reported the following:

My first response was, “Goodness, I hope not.” Page 99 is mostly just descriptive. It begins in the middle of a sketch of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel about Francis and continues with an outline of Elizabeth Goudge’s narrative biography of him. Certainly these are two very different accounts of Francis, and if the reader looks back at page 98, or goes on to page 100, it will be clear that both works challenge sentimental stereotypes about him. So to that extent, the descriptions do suggest something about the whole book, which argues that interpretations of Francis have varied more than most people realize, and that many constructions of Francis are countercultural critiques. But page 99 doesn’t include much historical interpretation, analysis, context, new insights, or advancement of my thesis – nothing to move it past a description of one thing after another, though I hope it’s a clear and engaging description.

On further reflection, though, I wonder if “quality” of the whole means its character or nature, rather than its overall structure and purpose, or its value and merit. From that perspective, page 99 reveals a good deal. It shows that I like to use close readings of texts and that I think individual texts can tell us a lot about cultural currents. It shows that I provide some sense of the literary and theological contexts of these writings, though it misses my references to historical and social matrices, to say nothing of visual art and material culture, or practice and action.

Even better, it shows how drastically the various visions of Francis can differ. Kazantzakis’s Francis affirms the goodness in nature but tries to transcend it; Goudge’s Francis finds God in it. Kazantzakis muses on sex and eating while Goudge thinks about the human spiritual journey. Goudge’s Francis works through struggle and sin toward mystical union with God. Kazantzakis’s God looks at all of Francis’s desperate efforts and screams “Not enough!”

So page 99 supports one of my guiding questions to the reader: What is missing from your vision of Francis? In other words, how is it partial or limited? How might you enlarge and complicate it in light of the history of interpretation?

Learn more about St. Francis of America at the University of North Carolina Press website and Patricia Appelbaum's blog.

Writers Read: Patricia Appelbaum.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Egyptian Dream"

Noha Mellor is Professor of Media, with special focus on pan-Arab media, as well as Deputy Director of the Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance at the University of Bedfordshire and co-director of Centre for International Media Analysis, Research & Consultancy.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Egyptian Dream: Egyptian National Identity and Uprisings, and reported the following:

As a native Egyptian, I was moved by the 2011-uprising and the people’s chant to overthrow the regime. I have wanted to write about the uprisings since then but so much has happened, and it was difficult to structure an informed discussion while changes constantly disrupted the political scene. One topic that really intrigued me was the Egyptian identity especially when one American friend asked me if Egyptians share one national ethos, or a dream like the American dream. This book The Egyptian Dream is an attempt to explore that question.

On page 99, I discuss one of the main cornerstones of national identity, namely education, and I argue that education system in Egypt has contributed to consolidating a two-tier society, in as much as it is involved in stratifying citizens, not necessarily according to their intellectual abilities, but according to their socio-economic status. The Egyptian education system is characterised by its bifurcation, but this is also mirrored in the state of the language as the tool to articulate national identity and the main instrument for social interaction between educators and students. The written variety of Arabic is largely taught at state schools, although the Egyptian vernacular has been recently debated as a proof of the uniqueness of Egypt casting doubt on its ‘Arab-ness’. On the other hand, English language has prevailed in the ever-increasing number of private schools. In fact, the 2011-revolution is an example of the success of privately-educated people with a host of skills, including English language and media skills, who attracted a great deal of attention from both regional and Western media.

After discussing education, language, religion, social class and revolutionary ideas, the book concludes that Egyptians may not share a set of values which they can ascribe to themselves á la the American creed, whether in work ethics or democratic or constitutional values, and which could incorporate diverse groups, including non-Egyptians, into the national Egyptian fabric. The only dominant value, which has gained more force since 2011, is patriotism, as a manifestation of strong loyalty to the territory rather than to a set of norms. Diversity in ideologies and beliefs, however, and which used to prevail during the early part of the twentieth century, has now become a divisive force in Egypt.

Learn more about The Egyptian Dream at the Edinburgh University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christian Lange's "Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions"

Christian Lange is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Utrecht University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, and reported the following:

Applying the page 99 test to my book, a cultural history of Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, I find that its 99th page wraps up a discussion about the views on the afterlife held by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, an 11th-century professor of Islamic law and theology at Baghdad and quite possibly the most famous Muslim scholar of religion of all times. The Islamic afterworld enjoys a reputation among non-Muslims that is not exactly glowing. As I recapitulate in the introduction to the book, there is a long history of polemics against Islam that targets the Muslim paradise in particular. The Islamic otherworld, according to its critics over the course of centuries, is grossly sensualist—there is even sex in it! And the God that presides over it, the same detractors maintain(ed), is excessively lenient and ready to forgive Muslims, even if they’ve sinned; as for non-Muslims, there is only eternal punishment in hell.

Enters al-Ghazali. His contribution consists in resisting easy categorizations of God as either lenient or violent, and also in refuting simplistic materialist interpretations of the afterlife. His is a voice of moderation, and as such he is remembered by Muslims today: as someone who brought the various strands of Muslim thought under the same single fold of a law-abiding, rational and deeply spiritual version of Islam. Al-Ghazali maintains that God is just, which means that people mustn’t think they can shun responsibility for sins. However, God is also kind, which puts moral rigor into perspective; forgiveness is real! And then, the great promise of human life is not material, but spiritual, because the greatest joy in paradise is to see God, a joy that “shall cause one to be quite oblivious of the other pleasures of paradise”.

Al-Ghazali’s middle course is flanked on both sides by literalist, materialistic as well as highly speculative and intellectualist teachings about paradise and hell. All these traditions of thought are examined in my book, which, I dare say, is the most comprehensive study of the topic so far. Yet al-Ghazali remains a central figure, not just because he resolves dogmatic issues but because he is a writer who engages the imagination. And that, after all, is the basis of which paradise and hell have at all times flourished.

Learn more about Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Cheek's "The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History"

Timothy Cheek began studying China at the Australian National University in the 1970s and has traveled to China and worked with Chinese colleagues since 1981. After receiving his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 1986 he taught in the US until 2002 when he took up the Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia.

Cheek applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History ends with this quote:

“If the intellectuals still loll about in the relaxed atmosphere of the cities and the foreign concessions, then they will not make revolution.”

Mao Zedong? Some Chinese anarchist or other Bolshevik? No, the words of Liang Shuming, noted as “China’s last Confucian.” The page focuses on the 1920s and 30s, about a third of a way through the arc of the book that maps the words and deeds of Chinese intellectuals who tried to shape public life from 1895-2015.

This page has the story of two Liangs—Liang Qichao the famous reforming journalist of the early 1900s, now disillusioned with the West after visiting the devastation of post Great War Europe, and Liang Shuming, whom I present as a revolutionary conservative seeking many of the goals we associate with Mao and the rural revolution of the Communists, but Liang set up his rural revolution on Confucian principles. Liang Shuming would meet with Mao in Yan’an, the Communist’s rural capital, in the late 1930s, and before that he would join forces with trans-Pacific Chinese liberal James Yen in promoting science and education in the villages in a joint Rural Reconstruction Movement.

Two themes of the broader story appear on page 99. First, While China’s intellectuals were understandably focused on fixing China—then at a low point of ill-governance, poverty, and domination by imperial powers—they looked not only to the new and the West, but also to native resources (and not simply “tradition”) as well as other Asian examples, notably from India. Second, by the 1920s reformers and revolutionaries alike accepted that rural China had to be a focus of their efforts. There lived the vast majority of Chinese and for some, like Liang and Mao in their different ways, there breathed the best virtues of Chinese civilization.

Both Liangs on page 99 reflect the dynamism and range of choices, as well as terrifying challenges, confronting Chinese intellectuals in the decades between Empire and Socialist State.

Learn more about The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ginger Strand's "The Brothers Vonnegut"

Ginger Strand grew up in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, but mostly on a farm in Michigan. She is the author of one novel and three books of narrative nonfiction, including Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate. She has published essays and fiction in many places, including Harper's, The Believer, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The New England Review and the New York Times, as well as This Land and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. In addition to writing frequently about collisions between nature, culture, science and the arts, Strand frequently works with photographers, and has contributed essays to photography books by Lisa Kereszi, Kyler Zeleny, and the Magnum Agency project Postcards from America.

Strand applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Brothers Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut is feeling frustrated at his PR job at General Electric. His brother Bernard, a brilliant scientist, is making headlines at GE with his startling new project: weather control. Kurt is trying hard to be a good company man, while trying to write marketable short stories at night and on weekends. But his efforts are only getting him a stack of rejection slips. And the position he had hoped would be a safe, easy job to feed his family while he launched his writing career is beginning to feel like a trap.
The new section opens like this:

Kurt was doing his best for GE. But it wasn’t enough to applaud every new gadget or machine the company cooked up as if it would change the world. It wasn’t enough to obey your GE boss and play softball on a GE team and buy your appliances at the GE employee store. The company wanted to tell you how to think too.

Every week or so, a new poster went up, Lemuel Boulware’s florid signature at the bottom. “Why must we SAVE more—as well as PRODUCE more?” “Should pay be equal everywhere?” “What is Communism? What is Capitalism? What is the Difference to You?” You could be sure Mr. Boulware—a.k.a. Mr. Bullwhip—would tell you the answers. He had all the answers, Mr. Bullwhip did. Mr. Bullshit was more like it, at least as Kurt saw it. Boulware’s messages to the employees were unabashedly pro-America and anti-labor.

This is fairly representative of something I was trying to do throughout this book, something I have never done before: write nonfiction from a close-in third-person point of view. I wanted the book to read like a novel, even as it was strictly factual, and fully documented in endnotes. I wanted the reader to feel like she was in Kurt Vonnegut’s head, or Bernard Vonnegut’s head, as the two brothers navigated the moral landscape of America in the new atomic age.

Learn more about the book and author at Ginger Strand's website.

The Page 99 Test: Killer on the Road.

--Marshal Zeringue