Francesca Russello Ammon's "Bulldozer"

Francesca Russello Ammon is Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape, and reported the following:

Bulldozer chronicles the widespread application of building demolition and land clearance in the postwar United States. A “culture of clearance”—that is, the ideology, technology, policy, and practice of large-scale destruction—underpinned this work, and it was powerfully rooted in the preceding experience of World War II. Page 99 discusses this postwar transition, focusing on the roles of mid-century housing policy and defense industries in fueling this national story.

Federal legislation incentivized both the execution of clearance and the construction of housing that sometimes ensued. As page 99 reveals, the GI Bill of 1944 made homeownership more affordable. Through zero down-payment loans, coupled with low interest rates and long amortization periods, the bill enabled nearly four million World War II veterans to become homeowners. To make way for much of this housing, countless acres of farmland and forests fell. Earthmoving companies also leveled hillsides and moved massive amounts of dirt. These efforts helped create the large, flat, seemingly blank slates upon which suburban tract housing, shopping malls, and industrial and office sites were built.

As elaborated elsewhere in the book, additional policies further propelled the rise of the postwar bulldozer. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 provided 90 percent federal subsidies for highway construction. It spurred the removal of large quantities of earth, rock, and physical infrastructure, while also facilitating the flight of residents and businesses to the suburbs. Meanwhile, in cities, Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 funded the bulldozing of buildings by covering two thirds of the cost of acquiring and clearing “slums” for urban redevelopment.

The large-scale application of construction equipment during World War II helped pave the way for these postwar policies and practices. As page 99 further discusses, Southern California quite tangibly exemplified the transfer of wartime men, machines, and methods from battlefront to home front. It was the port of departure and return for the Naval Seabees (short for Construction Battalions), many of whom settled in the defense-fueled region upon their return. Through postwar employment with wrecking, earthmoving, and construction companies, some of these men were able to put their new and war-honed skills to use. But the reach of the postwar bulldozer was not limited to California alone. Landscapes across the county felt its influence. As thousands of buildings and acres of natural growth gave way to the bulldozer, the culture of clearance dramatically remade the postwar American landscape.

Learn more about Bulldozer at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Satter's "The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep"

David Satter has written about Russia for almost four decades. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Satter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, and reported the following:

The book deals on page 99 with the Nord-Ost theater siege in 2002 in Moscow in which nearly a thousand theater goers were suddenly taken hostage by Chechen terrorists. The page, itself, describes the beginning of the siege which ended when Russian special forces flooded the theater with lethal gas killing at least 129 of the hostages. Page 99 is representative of the book because there is evidence of official involvement in the seizure of the theater and the book in its entirety deals with the major provocations that have characterized Russia since the fall of the U.S.S.R. and have been crucial to keeping the ruling group in power. These include the Ostankino Television tower massacre in 1993, the Russian apartment bombings in 1999, Nord-Ost, the Beslan school massacre in 2004 and, of course, the invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

Turning by chance to the Nord-Ost theater siege and its chilling beginning, the reader is given a very good idea of all of the other chilling episodes that are described in the book and finds hints of the conclusions that will soon be drawn.

Learn more about The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carl David Ipsen's "Fumo: Italy’s Love Affair with the Cigarette"

Carl David Ipsen is Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era (2006) and Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (1996).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Chapter 5: Camel – Women, Sex and Americane in the Postwar Decades

The cultural landscape of smoking in Italy underwent significant changes after World War II. Chapter 4 explored the link between poverty and smoking in the quarter-century or so after the conflict, a relatively unreflective era during which Italians embraced as a package both prosperity and smoking. Smoking of course had other valences than economic in the era before health concerns came to dominate the discourse surrounding tobacco consumption, and like the association of smoking and relative wealth, or at least the escape from misery, various of those valences were positive. In this chapter, we look at several of these: the symbolism of American cigarettes, continued tension about women and smoking, and the link, both implicit and explicit, between smoking and sex. As we’ll see, these categories overlap and together depict what we might call the Italian celebration of smoking, when smoking in Italy, to use Klein’s term, was still sublime. It was a tradition that persisted into subsequent decades, though ever more contested and subdued by the issue of smoking and health. That persistence owes something to Italian attitudes about smoking and risk, the topic of chapter 6.

Prevalence and Male versus Female Smoking in the Postwar Era

Smoking prevalence (the percentage of the population that smokes), both how it changed over time and the differences between male and female prevalence provides a useful background to a number of topics discussed in the next two…

Page 99 of Fumo is the first page of chapter five: “Camel – Women, Sex and Americane in the Postwar Decades.” As such it looks back at the previous chapter on smoking and poverty and also forward to the following one on smoking and risk. Each of my chapters incorporates a cigarette name in the title. Chapter 5 is Camel because of the fascination with American cigarettes in Italy after WWII (initially Camel, Chesterfield and Lucky Strike were available). American cigarettes constituted a tiny fraction of legal sales in those years but dominated the large contraband market. They were so familiar as to be simply referred to as “Americans” or americane (f.pl.). These decades – the 1950s and 1960s – coincided with Italy’s “economic miracle” and also constituted the golden age of Italian smoking. More and more Italians could afford to smoke and widespread concern about the health risks were still in the future. Smoking enjoyed, alas, a host of positive associations: relative wealth (or at least escape from poverty), glamour, self-assurance, liberation (for women). In literature and films smoking punctuated all sorts of crucial moments, often sexual ones, standing in for the at the time unshowable act or employed as an antidote for sexual frustration. So page 99 is indeed representative of a large chunk of the book and speaks to the overall approach. It does not give any hints to my discussions of Italian smoking in the early years of the cigarette (after about 1880) and during Fascism. Nor does it look farther ahead to the chapters on the anti-smoking era in Italy, on contraband, and on the eventual privatization of the Italian tobacco monopoly (which controlled production and sales from 1861 to 1998). The book concludes with the successful (and well observed) anti-smoking law implemented in 2005.

Learn more about Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

C. M. Woolgar's "The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500"

Christopher Woolgar is professor of history and archival studies at the University of Southampton and editor of the Journal of Medieval History.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In addition to sugar itself in its different forms, there were also sweet confections and preserves. A group of these — signalled by the suffix -ade — originated from the Mediterranean and arrived in England already in boxes and pots. Among them were pinionade (a confection made with pinenuts), festucade (made with pistachio nuts), citrinade, ‘gingerbrade’, that is, gingerbread (found made with green ginger and with white ginger), pomade (made with apples) and succade — simply a confection made with sugar. Dame Katherine de Norwich acquired boxes of pinionade, festucade and gingerbrade in 1336-7. Citrinade appears towards the end of the fourteenth century, at a great price: 2 lbs. bought for Henry, Earl of Derby, cost 56s.; and it also appears, along with pomade, succade and coinade, a quince preserve, bought for the household of Thomas of Lancaster, Duke of Clarence, in 1418-21. By the mid-fifteenth century, citrinade was used as a cosmetic as well, as a sweet-scented powder, possibly also for the colour it gave. This transition in use was also to be made by pomade.

Preserves were made in England, as well as imported, by the mid-fifteenth century. In the first instance the confections were prepared using honey, which was more abundant than sugar: ‘char de quince’, preserved quince flesh, sometimes mixed with that of warden pears, was made in this way. Comfits, prepared sweetmeats (although sometimes simply a sweet sauce), and compotes were never common, but they began to establish themselves in ways that suggest they had a distinctive place in food culture. On the one hand these might appear, like electuaries, as palliative medicines; but they also featured in dining, among the foods that might come with spice plates at the conclusion to a meal, or for distribution on special occasions, such as funerals. John Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter, in his will of 1368, instructed that there should not be a drinking with spices around his body in the choir, but allowed that it might happen in the chapter house or elsewhere. When the body of the Duke of Clarence was brought back to England for burial in 1421, his household spent £1 3s. 3d. in London on confections for the day of his burial.

Spices, sugars and preserves were of great importance for the food culture of medieval England. They connected individuals to commodities that had travelled half-way round the globe, commodities that were fabulous in their reputation and price; they fuelled the literary imagination and the vocabulary of sensory devotion; and they brought exotic tastes — and a passion for them — to the country. It is perhaps no wonder that moralists saw them as symbolic of exaggerated expenditure, as a harbinger of perdition; but they also saw in them heavenly qualities, qualities that inspired religious imagination.

Food and drink mattered to medieval people in many ways, not simply in terms of diet and nutrition. We can learn much about their daily lives and mentalities from looking at the connections that came with growing food, preparing it for consumption, and eating and drinking — which took up major parts of their time, effort and resources. A key element in their food culture were the sauces, spices, sugars and preserves, around which a chapter (and page 99) centre. These were highly desirable exotic goods of great value, which had a profound impact on medieval life — it was, after all, the quest for sea routes to the spice islands that drove the European voyages of discovery of the second half of the fifteenth century.

But to start the story where it should begin: by the twelfth century there was a cuisine that was common to the elite across Europe. Based on sharp, acidic sauces and highly flavoured with spices, it had probably evolved as a response to one of the great practical problems of the Middle Ages: the preservation of food. Salt solutions — sauces (in Latin, salsa) — contained other elements as well, herbs and spices, which were a subtle way of shaping flavours. Sauces and spices stimulated the appetite and continued to operate as food was digested, heating it and assisting in the process. Spices from the east had started to arrive in southern Europe by 1000 AD, and the trade expanded greatly through the Middle Ages. Sugar, treated as a spice, was cultivated in the Middle East and increasingly across the islands of the Mediterranean, in southern Spain and on the islands of the Atlantic. It brought a sweetness to foods in northern Europe that had only before been available from honey and fruits.

To some, spices of great price were both an extravagance and an undesirable sensory stimulation that would lead to perdition. But of course many people did not see it that way. Strewn on food as it was served at elite meals, sweetmeats and spices were also presented for consumption at the close of the meal (perhaps as we would eat chocolates), or taken separately.

Learn more about The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carol Wayne White's "Black Lives and Sacred Humanity"

Carol Wayne White is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Bucknell University. She is the author of Poststructuralism, Feminism, and Religion: Triangulating Positions and The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631–1679): Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism, and reported the following:

On page ninety-nine of Black Lives and Sacred Humanity, I discuss James Baldwin’s complex relationship with structured religion, exploring why he continued to be fascinated with it even as he remained a harsh critic of its perceived limitations.

One passage encapsulates this discussion:

In select writings, Baldwin targets both dominant white Christian culture and the black holiness tradition of his youth, which he saw as permeated by problematic ideological aspects of the former. In both systems of meaning, Baldwin identified a root problem, manifest in various ways and on different levels: systematic vilification of blackness. Key religious ideas functioned (either explicitly or implicitly) in a racist culture essentially to devalue black bodies as unworthy and inherently inferior to white ones, and they generated deeply embedded black self-loathing among many African Americans. In To Crush a Serpent (1987), one of his final published essays, Baldwin sums up a theme that he had addressed throughout many earlier ones: “Race and religion, it has been remarked, are fearfully entangled in the guts of this nation, so profoundly that to speak of the one is to conjure up the other. One cannot speak of sin without referring to blackness, and blackness stalks our history and our streets.”

Ford Madox Ford’s maxim that in reading page ninety-nine of a book, the quality of the whole will be revealed to one, remains enigmatic to me. What is clear to me, however, is that my discussion on page ninety-nine is neither representative of the fuller chapter on Baldwin, nor the book as a whole. First, the chapter illustrates Baldwin’s efforts during the mid-twentieth century to enhance race relations in the United States with an expanded view of humanity and our capacity to love each other.

Second, Black Lives and Sacred Humanity explores a new religious ideal within African-American culture that emerges from humanistic assumptions and is grounded in religious naturalism. Identifying African-American religiosity as the ingenuity of a people constantly striving to inhabit their humanity and eke out a meaningful existence for themselves amid culturally coded racist rhetoric and practices, it constructs a concept of sacred humanity and grounds it in existing hagiographic and iconic African-American writings.

The first part of the book argues for a concept of sacred humanity that is supported by the best available knowledge emerging from science studies, philosophy of religion, and the tenets of religious naturalism. With this concept, the book features capacious views of humans as dynamic, evolving, social organisms having the capacity to transform ourselves and create nobler worlds where all sentient creatures flourish, and as aspiring lovers of life and of each other. Within the context of African-American history and culture, the sacred humanity concept also offers new ways of grasping an ongoing theme of traditional African-American religiosity: the necessity of establishing and valuing blacks’ full humanity. In the second part, the book traces indications of the sacred humanity concept within select works of three major African-American intellectuals of the early and mid-twentieth century: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Dubois, and James Baldwin. The theoretical linkage of select ideas and themes in their writings with the concept of sacred humanity marks the emergence of an African-American religious naturalism.

As an alternative to theistic models of African American religiosity and spirituality, this study is an unabashed celebration of religious humanism.

Learn more about Black Lives and Sacred Humanity at the Fordham University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cathryn J. Prince's "American Daredevil"

Cathryn J. Prince is the author of several nonfiction history books, including Death in the Baltic: The WWII Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science.

Prince applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World's First Celebrity Travel Writer, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“Halliburton agreeably posed for pictures, granted some more interviews, and mailed copies of the Peruvian newspaper articles to Chambers, who loved the stamps and the “picture of yourself surrounded with dignitaries at whose top-hats I’ve gazed with admiration and awe. I don’t quite make out what’s happened to your hair unless that’s the latest Peruvian style of cut and the beard seems so far to be a moustache–otherwise it’s fine!”

Halliburton led Chambers to believe everything was fine. However, he ended up staying in Lima for three weeks…although not for pleasure. Rather “one blasted thing after another had held me here. I had to go to the hospital for a week for another damned hemorrhoid operation–had been getting worse for months–and decided I’d best get it over with where there was a hospital. Halliburton’s father later deleted Halliburton’s explanation for his extended stay.

Page 99 of American Daredevil finds Richard Halliburton recently arrived in Peru after becoming the first person to swim the length of the Panama Canal (locks included).

At first blush page 99 doesn’t seem to be, as Ford Madox Ford said, “qualitative of the whole.” However, closer scrutiny of the page’s two middle paragraphs actually reveal a great deal about Halliburton’s character, his relationships with those close to him, and the life he led.

These two paragraphs show readers how skillfully Halliburton navigated the fine line between his public persona and private life. It shows how Halliburton managed to wear a smiling, carefree face in public, it was a face and attitude his fans had come to expect and adore. This was the face he presented to the journalists who by now were following him at every turn.

In the letter quoted in the first paragraph readers hear from Halliburton’s long-time editor David Laurence Chambers. His remarks speak Halliburton’s ease with politicians and diplomats. Indeed Halliburton could converse as easily with famous people as he could with ordinary, everyday people. Possessing a great deal of charm, he was as interested in people–no matter their background–as they were in him.

Readers see how Halliburton never gave those outside his intimate circle any inkling of the discomforts he endured while trekking around the globe in search of adventure. He knew his public expected their hero to be attired in neatly pressed trousers, polished walking stick in hand. Halliburton revealed little of his private self to the public for whom he served as an intrepid globetrotting guide during the period in the inter-war period.

The second paragraph contains a letter from Halliburton to his father Wesley. It’s important because it reveals how Halliburton allowed himself to be vulnerable with those closest to him. Yet, it’s important to note this paragraph was not included in a posthumous book of Halliburton’s letters. Wesley Halliburton went to great lengths to hide anything that (from his perspective) might taint his son’s image, be it his son’s occasional health issues or his son’s homosexuality. Indeed as a media darling of the 1920s and ‘30s Halliburton had to hide his homosexuality and continuously burnish his image as a masculine trailblazer.

As I write in American Daredevil, Halliburton was adept at harnessing the media of his day to gain and maintain a widespread following long before our age of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and thus became the first adventure journalist. He inspired generations of authors, journalists, and everyday people who dreamed of fame and glory to explore the world.

Learn more about the book and author at Cathryn J. Prince's website.

The Page 99 Test: Death in the Baltic.

Coffee with a Canine: Cathryn J. Prince & Hershey and Juno.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Elder's "The Sacred Mirror"

Robert Elder is assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790-1860, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Sacred Mirror, I wrote:

In the South words were powerful, part of a broader and deeper ‘language’ of symbols and meaning that southerners used to order their world. Outside observers marveled, and some southerners lamented, that in the South the wrong words could end friendships, provoke violence, and even lead to the loss of life, evidence of the close relationship between speech, honor, and identity.... For those who did not understand the thick context that surrounded the act of speaking in the South, the reactions provoked by a veiled implication or a petty slight could seem disproportionate. But to southerners these were vital matters that threatened their control over their very identities.

Women held a special place in such a culture. While a woman’s words could do as much damage as a man’s, women were neither subject to direct reprisal nor permitted to engage in violent defense of their own reputations. This mix of power and powerlessness gave rise to an atmosphere in which women were both lauded and feared. Because of their association with moral virtue, women’s words generally held credence on certain matters of honor and reputation, making a woman with a loose tongue a particularly vexing problem from a male point of view.

The records of local churches reveal both the importance that attached to speech in the church and community as well as the way that the church provided an avenue for (mostly) men to address the problem of their female detractors.

This passage is actually a central and quite representative part of my argument in The Sacred Mirror. Most histories of evangelicalism in the early American South have argued that the South’s honor culture represented one of the primary obstacles to the spread of evangelical religion in the region, especially before 1830. But these histories don’t take into account the depth and complexity of honor as an ethical system that ordered southerners’ lives and shaped their identities in virtually every sphere of life, including their religion. In this passage, I describe how men in evangelical churches sometimes used the mechanism of church discipline to address various forms of (mostly female) speech circulating in their communities. Because it was public, especially so in the democratic Baptist churches, discipline could be remarkably effective in addressing rumors or other types of secret speech that men (and sometimes women) considered detrimental to their honor. At the same time, and again because it was public, church discipline was a fraught avenue to address these concerns due to the risk that an investigation might prove the rumor true and cement dishonor and shame, as indeed sometimes happened. Either way, church discipline was unavoidably part of the manufacture and maintenance of honor in local communities throughout the South, which is part of the The Sacred Mirror’s argument that honor and evangelicalism were intertwined in ways that we haven’t previously understood.

The Page 99 Test works!

Learn more about The Sacred Mirror at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Gilbert's "Mother Tongue"

Christine Gilbert is a writer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker and is the creator of the popular blog Almostfearless.com.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mother Tongue: My Family's Globe-Trotting Quest to Dream in Mandarin, Laugh in Arabic, and Sing in Spanish, and reported the following:

From page 99:

It only took a few days of sun and watermelon smoothies for the persistent throbbing in my forehead to go away. My sinuses cleared. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla that had been sitting on my chest for the last few months was gone. We took long walks on the Ping River, wearing flip-flops and T-shirts. Cole jumped at the opportunity to play with other kids, making friends with the guesthouse owner's toddler and playing happily in the dirt together with sticks.

At first we didn't talk about Beijing. We remained in a state of shock, making the motions of living - eating Thai food, reading books and playing with Cole - but an endless horizon of the unknown stretched out before us. Now what?

Childhood trauma is a wound that never heals. It scabs over, forms a scar. It fades to just a slivery thin line on your skin, a story you tell, the time that thing happened to you. But unlike physical wounds, it can break open again. I had packed away my childhood for a decade before having Cole. It was my origin story, but it didn't define me. I never used it as a crutch. In fact, I prided myself on most people never suspecting that I went through high school as a ward of the state, living in foster care. I got a little thrill if someone assumed I had an idyllic childhood. All I ever wanted was to fit in, to pass.

I loved this experiment. Page 99 in Mother Tongue caught a more serious tone than most of the rest of the book, which is about my family and I traveling in Beijing, Beirut and Mexico so I can learn to speak Mandarin, Arabic and Spanish. Page 99 hits us just as we are at a crossroads in our journey where we have to make a decision to keep trying this or call it quits and figure something else out entirely. At the time I was honestly ready to tell my publisher I quit. Thankfully I was given time to cool off, which I did.

Visit Christine Gilbert's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hugh B. Urban's "Zorba the Buddha"

Hugh B. Urban is Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, where he studies comparative religion, religions of South Asia, and new religious movements.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement, and reported the following:

Zorba the Buddha focuses on the life, teachings, and global religious following of the controversial Indian guru known in his early years as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and in his later years simply as Osho (1931-1990).

It is an interesting coincidence that page 99 of my book contains a long block quote from Rajneesh that was published in 1978 under the title “This is Not a Democracy.” In many ways, this quote strikes to the heart of my book. In this statement, Rajneesh was addressing the complaints of many followers of his community in Pune that violence and abuse had infected the encounter groups and meditation sessions at the ashram. After all, many young Europeans and Americans had come to the Pune ashram in search of a kind of anarchistic, free love utopia, and many found in the community a radically liberating and empowering form of spiritual practice – a “religionless religion” that creatively combined Indian meditation with elements of Western psychotherapy. Yet many were also disturbed to find forms of authoritarianism and violence at work in the community, which shocked even some who had been sympathetic to the group, such as Dick Price, the founder of the New Age spiritual center of Esalen in California. In response, Rajneesh stated quite clearly that “This is not going to be a democracy…Whatsoever I decide is absolute.” If anyone was not comfortable with the sort of boundary-breaking violence and sexual transgression in these encounter sessions, he concluded, they were “free to leave.”

This tension between radical freedom and authoritarian control is central to the Osho-Rajneesh movement from its inception. Known throughout the media as “India’s most dangerous guru” and notorious for his iconoclastic attacks on established religious and political figures such as Gandhi and Nehru, Rajneesh established a remarkably progressive utopian movement that in many ways embodied a form of post-national sodality or global community. Yet, almost from the very beginning, the movement was also frequently criticized for its seeming authoritarian tendencies, its commercialism, and its embrace of capitalism. These tensions between utopian ideals and authoritarian impulses would later come to a head when the group relocated to the United States in the 1980s and established a huge community in the Oregon desert. While remarkably progressive and ahead of its time in terms of organic farming, recycling, and land reclamation, the Oregon community quickly descended into a series of increasingly bizarre criminal activities.

These tensions have resurfaced in recent debates surrounding the current Osho movement in India and around the globe, which has been divided by intense arguments over Osho’s legacy and rights to his name, writings, meditations, and properties.

It is precisely this tension between progressive utopian ambitions and disturbing authoritarian tendencies that I think runs throughout this complex movement; and it is this deep ambivalence within this and other charismatic religious movements that I tried to highlight in my book.

Learn more about Zorba the Buddha at the University of California Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine A. Mason's "Infectious Change"

Katherine A. Mason is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic, and reported the following:

Page 99 illustrates one of the central motifs that appears throughout my book: the generational split between the old guard of local Chinese public health bureaucrats who spend most of their time banqueting and doing sanitation inspections of highly questionable efficacy, and the young upstarts who seek to replace them by doing what they referred to as “real science.” It also includes a quite illustrative example of the ill-fated attempts of some of these young upstarts to interfere with the banqueting rituals that their older colleagues insisted on engaging in.

The story that begins the page actually starts on page 98. A measles vaccination team from a city public health institution in southeastern China is visiting a residents’ committee head at the local level to try to enlist her help in implementing a measles vaccination campaign. Despite the fact that the residents’ committee head is in charge of managing the health primarily of members of the so-called “floating population” of rural-to-urban migrants, who are nearly impossible to keep track of, she nevertheless promises her visitors that she will achieve a 100% vaccination rate. One of the younger members of the city vaccination team, whom I call Dr. Feng, then has the audacity to challenge this claim,. Page 99 begins with what happens afterwards to the unfortunate Dr. Feng:

At the banquet that followed, the department head made certain that Feng enthusiastically toasted those who would have to repair the relationship that he had threatened. The young man ended up drinking until he collapsed in the bathroom outside the banquet hall and had to be carried home.

This might sound a little extreme, especially for a bunch of officials who are supposed to be setting an example for good public health. But binge drinking was a pretty standard way for public health officials in China to both show their commitment to each other and ultimately to achieve public health goals.

I then go on:

Feng had threatened the guanxi ritual by trying to open the black box in which public health projects took place. For any given project, the procedures by which collaborating partners obtained the numbers they did were purposefully obscured. In fact, the nontransparency of the guanxi web was helpful in reaching campaign goals, because if city CDC leaders could not see how the numbers were produced, they could not verify that anything was not ‘true’…

To carry out any public health projects … my informants had to accept the numbers that the black box spit out and had to act as if they assumed that these numbers reflected what had actually been observed or completed – an assumption that Feng had refused to make. Although the older CDC members did not seem bothered by this disconnect, the younger ones found the obvious unreliability of the numbers immensely frustrating. They took the poor quality of the numbers as a personal affront to their status as scientists and an unethical rejection of their colleagues’ obligation to serve the interests of the professional common.

This last part gets at the heart of the generational split that is explored in this chapter and throughout the book – the newer, younger public health officials considered themselves to be scientists and were deeply dissatisfied with the seemingly unscientific numbers the old ways of doing things were producing. They were also in some cases deeply uncomfortable with the banqueting rituals that were used to produce these numbers. They instead wanted to establish a new set of professional norms that would do away with banqueting and insist that collaborators produce ‘true’ numbers, even if those numbers were not politically expedient. The book shows how these efforts, at least as of the time I was writing it, had largely failed. Without a new ethical system in place to replace guanxi, public health campaigns seemed to be even less capable of produced the ‘truth’ without banqueting rituals than they were with them.

Learn more about Infectious Change at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue