Scott S. Reese's "Imperial Muslims"

Scott S. Reese is Professor of Islamic History at Northern Arizona University and author of Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir and The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Registrar Khan and Da’ud al-Battah

Sayyid Rustom was not the only Muslim bureaucrat to take a hand in what could be described as largely religious matters. If anything, his successor M. Yasin Khan involved himself even more deeply in the religious affairs of his fellow believers. A native of Meerut in India, Yasin Khan arrived in Aden in 1918 as a fresh Bombay law graduate to serve as a “Temporary Extraordinary Assistant Resident.” In 1919, he was named Acting Registrar, an appointment made permanent in 1920. He served for at least fifteen years in this position in addition to a number of secondments as Hajj officer in the mid-1920s. Registrar Khan did not involve himself in the matrimonial affairs of Aden’s Muslims that seemed to preoccupy his predecessor. As Mitra Sharafi has pointed out, however, for many, engagement with the law offered “special opportunities for social mobility,” and the opportunity to act as important intellectual and cultural brokers between one’s community and the state. Registrar Kahn was certainly an exemplar of this kind of ambitious culture brokering, and, as such, he took an even greater interest in the religious concerns of the Settlement’s Muslim community. The result was a long-standing and complex association with the new Qadi of Crater, Da’ud al-Battah. Over the course of more than a decade, their association in some ways mirrored the confrontational relationship of their predecessors but was in others far more mutually beneficial.

Unlike Rustom Ali, Yasin Khan’s relations with the religious establishment of Aden began on a relatively promising note. Early in his tenure a group of notables led by the Shams al-‘Ulama’, Sayyid Abdullah Aydarus, with the support of the Aden Qadi, Da’ud al-Battah, petitioned the Resident for official recognition of a Wakf Committee to oversee the administration of local properties designated as “waqf” or “pious endowments,”, dedicated to the support of various mosques and shrines. In a letter to the Resident in February 1921, the notables stated that while there were numerous waqf properties in the Settlement, the agents charged with overseeing them frequently embezzled the rents. As a result, the mosques, whose upkeep was supposed to be paid for through them, as well as the properties themselves, were in a disgraceful state of repair. If steps were not taken, they wrote, the mosques of Aden would soon “become a danger to the public and the public health.” In an effort to remedy the situation, they wrote, “A number of leading citizens of Aden have met in [the] Shams al-‘Ulama’s house and appointed a committee of 6 persons ... with [the] Shams al-ulema [sic] as chairman to take delivery of these houses, to recover the rents [and] spend the same in the interests of the mosques and generally to look after (preserve) the mosques and their interests.” The British administration declined to formally recognize the Committee but acknowledged that the formation of such a group would undoubtedly improve the state of sacred sites within the Settlement. As such, they permitted Registrar Khan to act, in “his private capacity,” as an advisor to the group. In its first year of operation, the Wakf Committee encountered a number of problems in which Khan played a pivotal role, becoming an ardent partisan of the so-called traditional elite or, as we shall see, at least some of them.

On being asked to carry out the “page 99” test, like many authors, my first reaction was a sense of unease. What if page 99 was simply intellectual filler of interest to no one other than myself and making no contribution to the central arguments of my book Imperial Muslims? With great relief, I turned to page ninety-nine to discover that, indeed, Ford Madox Ford was right. While I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not this is a work of “quality” page ninety-nine certainly highlights certain critical themes of the book as a whole.

Imperial Muslims is a book about the creation of Muslim community within the confines of British rule. Set in Aden between its occupation in 1839 and the eve of the Second World, my work explores how individuals from widely varied backgrounds–hailing as they did from across the Indian Ocean–crafted a community utilizing the one commonality at their disposal: their faith. Specifically, I explore how Aden’s Muslims used common religious institutions, such as mosques, tombs, Islamic law and “pious endowments” to outline the boundaries of a community to which all could belong.

The relationship between Yasin Khan, a Bombay trained lawyer, and Da’ud al-Battah, a local Islamic court judge, is an instructive example. While from different intellectual traditions–and indeed different ethnic backgrounds–the two found common cause in their quest to control the port’s “pious endowments”–rental properties whose proceeds served to support mosques and other sacred Muslim spaces within the Aden Settlement. Such control allowed them to assert authority over the boundaries of community determining who was and was not an upstanding Muslim of Aden. While such efforts were not uncontested, they demonstrate an agency of individual Muslims that was largely independent of the imperial regime. So, while empire may have brought Aden’s Muslims together, it was Islam that made them a community.

Learn more about Imperial Muslims at the Edinburgh University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Natalie Carnes's "Image and Presence"

Natalie Carnes is Associate Professor of Theology at Baylor University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia, and reported the following:

“[A]ttempts at pure iconoclasm degenerate into parodies of iconophilia, while attempts at unlimited iconophilia flirt with violence and idolatry.”

“The way images emerge from breaking images echoes the way crucifixes emerge from breaking crucifies, which itself echoes the way the Image of God discloses God in the breaking that is the cross.”

These two statements—on either side of a section break on page 99—get at some of the central claims of Image and Presence. While image-lovers and image-breakers might vehemently oppose one another, they can end up looking strangely similar.

In the chapter where page 99 falls, I am looking at Reformation iconoclasm in particular, when iconoclasm took a theatrical turn. In Basel, Switzerland, for example, a crowd hauled a crucifix into the square and mocked it with words that echo the crucifixion accounts of the gospels, “If you’re God, then save yourself, but if you’re man, then bleed.” In Hildesheim, Germany, a crowd taunted a statue of Christ with lines from Christ’s tormentors in the Passion plays. In England, iconoclasts stripped the altars—just as priest do at the end of the Maundy Thursday service, in preparation for the Good Friday service remembering Christ’s death.

These image-breakers make and parody images in their efforts to reject them. And the way images emerge from breaking images expresses the theological claim of Christians: that the one who is called the Image of God discloses God most perfectly in the brokenness of the cross.

With their acts of image-breaking, the Reformation iconoclasts want to say that God is not bound by human artifice. They proclaim God’s absence in these images in order to insist on God’s universal presence. But divine presence in absence is exactly what the image-lovers want to claim as well. The image gives more than it is. It names both the presence and absence of what it images.

On page 99, Image and Presence is moving toward the claim that certain forms of iconoclasm can be internal to the practices of loving an image well. But the book moves in that direction with a warning: Unmoored from any image love, iconoclasm degenerates toward an insistence of divine absence in the world, while image-love, uninformed by an iconoclastic impulse to insist on the absence of the imaged, can harden into idolatry and even violence. The rest of the chapter explores how that violence can arise.

Learn more about Image and Presence at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Griffith Rollefson's "Flip the Script"

J. Griffith Rollefson is Associate Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland. He has served on the faculties of music at the University of Cambridge and at UC Berkeley, where he served as UC Chancellor’s Public Scholar, implementing the community engaged scholarship initiative Hip Hop as Postcolonial Studies in the Bay Area.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality, and reported the following:

The page 99 test holds up for my new book Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality. It gets to a central—and somewhat controversial—thesis of the book, namely, that in European hip hop we can hear that African American “double consciousness” is the particularized US form of a global postcolonial condition. Instead of rehashing the played-out cultural appropriation vs. cultural imperialism debate, the argument flips the script on global hip hop studies, decentering US hip hop and suggesting that the black American experience encoded in hip hop resonates from global histories of colonial oppression.

The argument might seem self-evident, but this is where it gets a bit tricky. A central premise of the book is that migrants from the former colonies and peripheries of Europe are attracted to hip hop’s forms of cultural critique. Obvious, right? But, importantly, a lot of these postcolonial people aren’t black. Sure, the book centers migrant voices ranging from Senegal, Ghana, and Cameroon to Jamaica and Grenada, but it places them side by side with voices from Algeria, Libya, Turkey, and farther afield to Cambodia, Chile, Pakistan, and… Sri Lanka. This is the point I’m making here on page 99 [inset, left; click to enlarge]—that scholars, critics, and hip hop fans alike have had trouble with the hip hop influenced global mash-ups of the South Asian Londoner, M.I.A., generating a deeply suspicious authenticity and appropriation discourse… that is further complicated by gender.

As I stress on this page from a section titled “London’s ‘Other Blacks,’” M.I.A. is not “borrowing” hip hop culture to reinvent her “own” ethnicity. I love Paul Gilroy—he’s an inspiration to me and the major touchstone in my work—and I fully understand the power asymmetries and histories of cultural theft that permeate the history of Afrodiasporic musics. This is not an “all lives matter” argument. The point is that M.I.A. grew up in diverse communities in London’s immigrant “ends.” The music of her diverse, international, and polycultural community resonated with her. She made that music work for her (instead of sticking to her “own,” what?, traditional Sri Lankan music?). And while her music might make us uncomfortable, that’s precisely the point: it’s transgressive of ethnic, gender, and political orthodoxies. As I put it later in the chapter, “we can hear in this music the very thing we are afraid we might—the sound of the authentically inauthentic.” This is the sound of postcoloniality.

Learn more about Flip the Script at the University of Chicago Press website, and check out the book’s companion website, which has audio, video, chapter summaries, more excerpts, other resources, and information on buying the book.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Kix's "The Saboteur"

Paul Kix is a deputy editor at ESPN the Magazine. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, New York, Men’s Journal, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The cold forced La Rochefoucauld more than he liked from the woods into a rural society where every glance, every smile, carried possible malevolence. Who would help him? Who would betray him? The questions were infinite and without answer, and so he spent what time he could in the barn, trusting only himself. But seclusion invited contemplation, and that was no better than strolling through Quarré-les-Tombes in a worker's costume. Alone, fighters dealt not only with the paranoia of Am I next? but with the guilt of Why have I been spared? The Resistance leader Henri Frenay put it best: "I felt overcome with fatigue. Crushed, oh, I was utterly crushed!...One by one faces of all those dear comrades rose up to haunt me...I felt ashamed to be free..."

It seemed it would be December forever.

One night in the barn, fast asleep on a bed of hay, something jostled La Rochefoucauld awake. He blinked and saw a half circle of uniformed Milice men and the overcoats and felt hats of SD officers. For a moment, no one moved. Robert tried to hide the fear already warming his cheeks. The Nazis looked at him, curious. Then the blows fell. After a stretch, "They tied me up like a sausage," Robert said, and then began searching the barn. They seemed to know what they were looking for, and in a moment they found the guns.

"I had nothing to do with that," La Rochefoucauld said. "I was sleeping here because I was tired."

The Nazis didn't buy it. They put him in the back of a vehicle idling outside and headed out.

His mind raced: How did they know where to find the arms? Who had given him up? Someone in the village who'd tracked him? Another résistant? But soon those thoughts gave way to darker ones: Where were they taking him? And what would they do to him when they got there?

On page 99, the protagonist of the book, Robert de La Rochefoucauld, deals with the repercussions of a series of successful sabotages against the machinations of the Nazis' war. Occupied France in the winter of 1943 was a paranoid and even frightening place, where résistants who'd escaped arrest silently awaited it.

Visit Paul Kix's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joan Ramon Resina's "The Ghost in the Constitution"

Joan Ramon Resina is Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. His books include Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Ghost in the Constitution we find a parallelism between the claim of the Falangist “national movement” to combat political sectarianism and the syndicalist rejection of “politics.” In the 1930s, both the extreme right and the extreme left combated “bourgeois democracy” for the purpose of crushing political plurality. The right attacked dissidence in the name of timeless symbols of Castilian imperialism, in a move reminiscent of the Renaissance transference of the political-theological principle of absolute authority to the Castilian nation, identified with its king. “Franco, Spain’s Caudillo through God’s grace—as the motto in Spanish coins declared—turned to this theological foundation of absolute authority in a gesture that found support in Falange’s own recourse to a form of the nostalgic sublime anchored in the combined authoritarianism of Church and Army.”

This page, although from a chapter devoted to the etiology of the violence unleashed during the Spanish Civil War, references the historical background of the book’s subject, namely the social cost of Spain’s political amnesia during the years of the transition from the military dictatorship to the constitutional monarchy. A quarter of a century after the “pact of silence” and the approval of an amnesty law shielding perpetrators of human rights abuses from prosecution and even from exposure (through anti-defamation laws), concern about the “stolen past” emerged in the public media, leading to the enactment of an innocuous “law for the recovery of the historical memory.” The Ghost in the Constitution not only discusses the concept of historical memory, its appropriateness as a source of legislation, and the implications of remembering and denying for the social welfare of a democracy, but also delves into the conditions of forgiveness and reconciliation.

The book’s historical coverage includes the nationalist motivations of the coup d’état against the Republic, the bombing of Guernica, the assault on Catalonia’s cultural specificity and institutions, the experience of the concentration camps, exile, and the precarious nature of memory. The maintenance of indirect forms of censorship and the reemergence of fascist behavior in post-Franco Spain through the perpetuation of “sociological Francoism,” that is, in the expression of nostalgia and tolerance of the values and methods of the dictatorship, is considered as the latency of archaic elements ready to be reactivated under favorable conditions.

In this hypothesis, the established idea of Spain’s transition to democracy as a harmonious resolution of a conflicted past appears seriously flawed. The legend of a consensual suturing of the historical wound (based on a free social contract) disguises the extortion that took place under cover of a political pact and the violence that accompanied its promulgation. “The spate of violent actions in that ominous year of 1977 could not have been coincidental. Important elements of the Francoist apparatus utilized small right-wing groups, always ready for violence, to destabilize society, justify a coup d’état, and block the incipient liberalization.”

The book lays out the reasons for the exhaustion and ultimate failure of the Constitution of 1978 to heal a country that never achieved its alleged national cohesion except under duress. In light of Spain’s regression to undemocratic values and behavior, including negationism and its correlative, the unleashing of right wing violence against dissidents and minorities, the question of memory versus denial emerges as central to the exegesis of the present. Memory, in this sense, is the passkey that unlocks the riddle of Spanish society’s dearth of democratic conviction.

Learn more about The Ghost in the Constitution at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Clary's "Gangsters to Governors"

David Clary is a news editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gangsters to Governors: The New Bosses of Gambling in America, and reported the following:

The page is part of the chapter where I lay out how organized crime interests seized control of casinos in postwar Las Vegas. When Nevada became the first state in modern America to legalize most forms of gambling in 1931, official oversight was exceptionally weak. Nevada itself had no enforcement role and gambling licenses were handed out on the local level, a fatal flaw that would be exposed years later when mobsters like Bugsy Siegel received approval to run casinos in Las Vegas.

One of these sordid characters was Benny Binion, a Texas native who pulled himself out of poverty by running an illegal numbers racket and high-stakes craps games in Dallas that attracted the likes of oil tycoons H.L. Hunt, Howard Hughes, and Clint Murchison Sr. Binion's cowboy charm belied a steely edge. Binion's rap sheet included two murder charges in the 1930s. A reform-minded administration forced Binion to pull up stakes and move to Las Vegas where he could ply his trade in peace.

On Page 99, I tell the story of Binion's first trip to Las Vegas and his effort to secure a gambling license for his first casino there in 1947. Binion appeared before the Nevada Tax Commission, which then was responsible for handing out licenses and collecting fees. I read an oral history of one of the commissioners at the meeting and he reported that Binion bragged about his lawless exploits in Texas and confirmed that his history of violence was true. Binion's graphic accounts of how he killed the two men "had the Tax Commission in stitches" and the panel granted the license.

This page is representative of one of the themes of the book: How weak regulation led to organized crime's control of gambling in Las Vegas. Binion went on to become a fixture in Las Vegas and founded the World Series of Poker, which brought him and his casino vast amounts of publicity. When Binion died on Christmas Day 1989, a friend aptly summed up his wild life: "He was either the gentlest bad guy or the baddest good guy you'd ever seen."

Visit David Clary's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gangsters to Governors.

--Marshal Zeringue

G.R.F. Ferrari's "The Messages We Send"

G.R.F. ("John") Ferrari hs been a professor at the Department of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, for over twenty-five years. His principal interests are in philosophical aesthetics and in ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Messages We Send: Social Signals and Storytelling, and reported the following:

If the idea behind the "Page 99" Test is that by that point an author who has lavished attention on a book's opening may be getting slapdash, then my page 99 would hold up reasonably well — at least, it reads much like the opening, even though by page 99 the book is more than half way done.  As it happens, the page also contains one of the book's more adventurous claims.  This tells you two things about the book: first, it is a concise and consistent read; second, it doesn't give everything away at once.  And the adventurous claim?  It's that the mimicry of actors is fundamental to all storytelling — not just to staged drama or to film.  If this is correct, it gives an insight into what the point of telling stories cannot be — it can't be anything personal between storyteller and audience — and suggests a reason why we tell stories in the first place: to transcend the delicate, sometimes tiresome personal negotiations that are the backbone of our day-to-day sociality, while still maintaining human touch with each other.  But the book has in fact spent the bulk of its first ninety-nine pages discussing exactly those delicate personal negotiations — how we dress for each other, flirt with each other, and in general manage the impressions that others get of us.  Why, then, does it spend the bulk of its next ninety-nine pages discussing storytelling?  Because its guiding ambition is to analyze the major types of social interaction that fall shy of full-out communication, assigning them to their appropriate position on an ascending communicative scale.  And it wants to show that the scale applies to formal communicative arts like storytelling as readily as it does to our day-to-day social interactions.  To move easily between established arts and everyday life is in fact among the book's distinctive qualities.

earn more about The Messages We Send at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maria Belodubrovskaya's "Not According to Plan"

Maria Belodubrovskaya is Assistant Professor of Film in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to  her new book, Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin, and reported the following:

The Test works well for my book: page 99 is central to my argument. The book explains why the regime of Joseph Stalin in Soviet Russia failed to install a true propaganda film industry, a filmmaking machine that produced Communist propaganda on order. The main reason why the Stalin regime failed was that the regime did not buttress its ambition for a mass propaganda cinema with the infrastructure, or the institutions and the workforce that this ambition required. Under Stalin, the Soviet film industry was structured such that the creative talent, and specifically the film directors, continued to be the critical decision makers in the production process. Page 99 belongs to Chapter 3, which details the director-centered mode that was at the core of Soviet film production. Page 99 addresses how in the 1930s the Soviet film administration tried and failed to introduce a powerful, Hollywood-style producer to counterbalance the authority of the film director. On this page, I quote Leontii Katsnel'son, the head of Lenfilm, a major film studio, who says that the attempt at forming production units headed by producers were unsuccessful at his studio. He states that the new producers were “unable to control the production life of all of their pictures and, as a result, work organization inside production units and even work discipline itself in many cases have deteriorated.” Ivan Kudrin of the Kiev Studio in Ukraine submitted a similar report. Why were these executives unable to implement the producer-based system? Because there was an extreme shortage of capable managers throughout the Soviet economy. For the reform to work, the Stalin regime had to train the new producers and initiate a better division of labor in film production. Absent a functioning institution of the producer and the division of labor, the regime had only a limited capacity at bringing film production under its control.

Learn more about Not According to Plan at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David N. Schwartz's "The Last Man Who Knew Everything"

David N. Schwartz holds a PhD in political science from MIT. He has worked at the State Department Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, and at Goldman Sachs in a variety of roles in both London and New York. He lives in New York with his wife, Susan. His father, Melvin Schwartz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Last Man Who Knew Everything provides background on one of Enrico Fermi's most important contributions, his theory of beta decay. In order to develop this theory, he needed first to understand Dirac's brilliant but extremely difficult theory of quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory. Fermi, in typical fashion, decided that he needed to teach it to others in order to fully understand it himself. In the process he came up with an approach that was pedagogically superior to Dirac's - so much so that in later years Hans Bethe and Eugene Wigner both said that they learned quantum field theory from the paper Fermi wrote on the subject.

Fermi went on to use quantum field theory to explain beta decay, a radioactive process in which neutrons in the atomic nucleus become protons (or vice versa). At the same time, electrons and neutrinos are created and emitted at high speeds. The interaction that resulted in beta decay was for many years called the Fermi interaction. Today it is more commonly called the weak interaction because it is so weak that it occurs only when the particles in the nucleus are extremely close to each other. His beta decay theory kicked off some fifty years of intensive research including the realization that the weak interaction was closely linked to the electromagnetic interaction; the discovery of three types of neutrinos; and the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The theory of beta decay was classic Fermi: a radical simplification of a complex theoretical concept developed by teaching it to others, which he then proceeded to use to solve a seemingly unrelated problem.

My hope is that by page 99 the reader realizes that this book is for the non-scientist - that the explanation of the science is intended for the reader with little or no background in physics. I have tried on every page to present the material as simply and clearly as possible without dumbing it down. Fermi had an absolute conviction that anyone could understand physics and this conviction inspired the way I presented the material myself.

Visit David N. Schwartz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander Thurston's "Boko Haram"

Alexander Thurston is visiting assistant professor of African studies at Georgetown University and the author of Salafism in Nigeria: Islam, Preaching, and Politics.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement, and reported the following:

Boko Haram is one of the deadliest jihadist groups in the world. It is the subject of a mounting academic literature, but the reasons for the group’s emergence and its embrace of violence are still debated. Much literature has suggested that the group is simply the manifestation of large, impersonal forces: some analysts point to poverty and inequality in Nigeria, where the group originated, while others point to the influence of transnational jihadism. My book argues for a hyper-local view of the conflict, and for an understanding that the founder, Muhammad Yusuf, fully committed to violence only after he lost support both among the wider Muslim community and among politicians. In other words, it’s important to understand Yusuf’s personal relationships with other important figures in the religious and political scenes.

Page 99 of my book deals with Yusuf’s rupture with Ja‘far Adam, who was at one time his mentor but who later became a bitter opponent. Both Yusuf and Adam belonged to what is called the “Salafi” trend, a loosely organized, global movement of Muslims who advocate strict, literal readings of the Qur’an and other sources. Yusuf and Adam disagreed, however, about topics such as Western-style education: whereas Yusuf made opposition to government schools one of his signature issues, Adam argued that Muslims could derive benefit even from secular schooling. The conflict between the two men became quite intense, with each trying to discredit the other.

From page 99:

Adam and others painted Boko Haram as agents of outside interests, including the Shi‘a, Nigerian Christians, the West, and foreign jihadists. These accusations reinforced Boko Haram’s sense of exclusivism, making Yusuf and his core followers feel that they could no longer trust Salafis who defended Western-style education or government service. The sect was likely responsible for Adam’s 2007 assassination.

That event – a crime that remains unsolved – became one of the key steps on Yusuf’s path to rebellion. A little more than two years later, isolated from most of his former mentors and allies, Yusuf and his followers launched a massive uprising in northeastern Nigeria. Over 1,000 people, including Yusuf, were left dead. But Boko Haram had started down the road to insurgency, and its violence still troubles Nigeria and neighboring countries today.

Visit Alexander Thurston's blog.

--Marshal Zeringue