Jeremy Withers's "Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles"

Jeremy Withers is Associate Professor of English at Iowa State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles: Contesting the Road in American Science Fiction, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles consists of part of the introduction to chapter three, a chapter devoted to analyzing how some science fiction texts of the New Wave Era (c. 1960-1975) depicted automobiles and bicycles. This page primarily sketches out some of the important historical background to this era, such as how it was a time when the United States experienced yet another surge in annual road and highway deaths and how it saw the beginnings of a cohesive environmental movement.

At first glance, page 99 feels related to this particular chapter, but not to the book as a whole, given that it makes quite specific historical references to New Wave era figures such as President Lyndon B. Johnson and legislation such as the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. However, this page gestures toward the book’s overall interest in historicizing the science fiction texts on which it focuses. That is, each chapter foregrounds how science fiction has engaged with larger cultural and political events related to transportation, events that shaped these texts during their creation and helped them find readers upon publication. More importantly, page 99 references two related, important points that the overall book makes: that the automobile’s deadly nature frequently alarmed American science fiction writers, as did the unsustainability of cars in their conventional form. Page 99 ends with the line: “More often than not, New Wave writers portray automobiles as murderous, pollution-belching monsters, and look instead to alternatives such as electric cars and human-powered bicycles.” Change “New Wave writers” in that line to “American science fiction writers” and you have a serviceable thesis statement for the entirety of Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles.

Learn more about Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Van Meter's "Deep Delta Justice"

Matthew Van Meter, raised a Quaker, has written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, Longreads, The Awl and others. A graduate of Middlebury College and Columbia University, he reports on criminal justice, teaches at College for Creative Studies and works as assistant director of Shakespeare in Prison. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.

Van Meter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Deep Delta Justice: A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and Their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Deep Delta Justice is the finale of a pivotal courtroom scene--Gary Duncan, the main character, a 19-year-old black shrimper, is on trial for touching a white boy on the shoulder in order to break up a fight. His lawyer, Richard Sobol, has rested his case, and the judge is about to render a verdict.

Page 99 opens with Gary feeling hopeful. Richard, a brilliant lawyer who would go on to become one of the luminaries of his generation, has picked apart the prosecutor's arguments effectively. I write of Gary: "[The] tension that had built up inside him, taut and wound tighter by each new injustice from when he touched the Landry boy until this moment, began to slacken."

At first, the judge seems to go Gary's way. But suddenly he changes course and announces a guilty verdict. The page ends with Gary's sense of betrayal and the pain of maturing into his "place" in Jim Crow society: "Gary felt himself fall through the floor even as he mechanically stood tall to comply with [the judge's] request. He was short of breath, as if his body were constricted by thick lines or pressed under weights. His family was behind him, and he turned slightly to look back at his mother. She was weeping, and the sight of her face fractured something behind his ribs. 'I know what this is,' he thought. Gary saw how people could just take and do things to you, and he understood that his family had known that truth for a long time and protected him. He felt naive, and he felt foolish. 'I know what this is,' he repeated to himself as he turned back to the judge."

Page 99 is uncannily representative of the entirety of Deep Delta Justice to me in several specific ways.

First, in terms of technique, it is the culmination of a dramatic scene that was sourced using the tools of a journalist and historian, then recounted using the tools of a novelist: emphasis on character development, storytelling through dialogue and accumulation of details, and "interiority" (the inner lives of characters). I work hard to earn these scenes; page 99 reflects dozens of hours of reporting and research--all hopefully invisible to the reader!

Second, in terms of my process, page 99 showcases two of the things that bring me the most joy as a reporter and writer. I got my start in writing through theatre, and I love the process of taking hundreds (or thousands!) of pages of trial transcript and editing them down to a scene's worth of snappy, propulsive dialogue. And the interiority--Gary's emotional world--was acquired by allowing him to tell me about this incredibly painful experience over and over again over the course of several years. The deep truth of it--that this was the moment when Gary first understood the traumatic reality of being black in America--only became clear to me on the tenth or twentieth telling.

Third, and most importantly, page 99 is poignant for me in terms of my duty as a storyteller who lives in a society that values me and my words far more than it has ever valued Gary Duncan or his words. Both as a reporter and someone who works with incarcerated people, I am constantly reminded of how little I have done to earn my outsize megaphone. But I have that megaphone, and it is my responsibility to use it to use it well. Telling Gary's story from his perspective does not absolve me of my participation in the system that oppresses him, but it is what I know how to do, and failing to tell that story would be a waste of the power I have inherited. So, rereading page 99, I am struck by how many of these words are Gary's. I am reminded of how, when I first read that passage aloud to him, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, "Yes. That's just how it was." He could not have said anything that would make me feel better.

Learn more about Deep Delta Justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Virginia Wright Wexman's "Hollywood's Artists"

Virginia Wright Wexman is professor emerita of English and art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books include Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (1993) and A History of Film (seventh edition, 2010).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood's Artists: The Directors Guild of America and the Construction of Authorship, and reported the following:

Hollywood’s Artists: The Directors Guild of America and the Construction of Authorship examines the way in which the DGA has helped to shape the belief that directors are the singular authors responsible for the artistry of Hollywood movies. Page 99 is part of a chapter that elucidates a corollary of this thesis by exploring the way in which the DGA’s mission was elaborated during the years in which the House UnAmerican Activities Committee directed its gaze on Hollywood. During a famous meeting in 1950 that had been sparked by a proposal to have every DGA member sign an oath of loyalty to the US government, Guild members asserted their claim to be the kind of artists who were also manly patriots.

Taken as a whole, Hollywood’s Artists traces the way in which the DGA has placed its creative rights mission at the center of its agenda in order to further the ambitions of its members to make themselves into artists. Throughout its history, the Guild has gained ever-greater creative control over production and credits, building on trends within the film industry and in the larger culture to achieve its goals. The group faced special challenges to this mission when television and newer media platforms posed different models of authorship. Another challenge emerged when the Guild attempted to assert ownership rights for directors as they exist in continental Europe, a project that was destined for failure in the USA.

Learn more about Hollywood's Artists at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew R. Hom's "International Relations and the Problem of Time"

Andrew Hom is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Editor of the journal, International Relations. He is the co-editor of Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (2017) and Time, Temporality, and Global Politics (2016).

Hom applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, International Relations and the Problem of Time, and reported the following:

Had I known I would have the opportunity to take the page 99 test for International Relations and the Problem of Time, I would have made sure that something dramatic happened on that page, as when scientists invented the Doomsday Clock – the ticking symbol of dread – to reckon with the nuclear revolution and other forms of apocalypse (it is 100 seconds to midnight, by the way). Or at least that someone would deliver a memorable quote – like ancient references to “Time the Destroyer”, or when a Minister in the UK Parliament accused the Conservative government of “using time as a weapon” in debates about foreign policy.

Alas, while earlier and later portions of the book cover such episodes, page 99 is invested in the less striking but equally important work of carefully building up conceptual tools to help us see just why and how time matters in world politics. It discusses mechanistic, historical, and structural-rationalist explanations in the study of International Relations (IR), comparing them based on how (and how much) they filter experience into a manageable amount of evidence or data; how they “cleave” or establish the bookends of the explanatory sequence; and how they turn surprising or discordant moments into those turning points, tragic flaws, and twists of fate that lead political processes in puzzling directions. This discussion comes near the end of chapter three, which introduces temporal concepts from narrative theory to IR.

Hold on a second (you may object), history – ok, but mechanisms, structures, and rationality don’t sound very much like “timey wimey” issues?

Yet these ways of explaining political phenomena are central to IR, which would be unrecognizable without references to history, the “structure of international anarchy”, assumptions about rational state behaviour, or accounts of how certain inputs mechanically produce reliable outpus. And one of the main goals of the book is to show that while many discussions may not appear temporal, and most scholars have not concerned themselves with time, IR concepts and modes of knowledge depend very much on hidden ideas about time. Following on from this, the book also shows just how IR theories and methods perpetuate particular ways of imagining and relating to time.

To accomplish this, Part One of the book develops a novel account of time as not just having political consequences but as a social and political phenomenon all the way down. Departing from other philosophical and theoretical treatments, which tend to assume some metaphysical or natural content to time, my book argues that all concepts of time and temporal symbols refer to underlying timing practices. Here timing means not just ‘when’ something happens but to much larger and more creative efforts to stitch together social relations and complex processes so that life unfolds in one way rather than others, and produces this outcome instead of that. References to time and temporality, then, refer not to objective features of the universe but to human efforts to time – a basic, pervasive, and widely overlooked aspect of social and political life.

Because it begins from such a different starting point, Part One also defends timing theory against prominent alternatives, before developing more precise analytical tools (as on page 99) to help us identify and unpack IR’s temporal foundations. Part Two then demonstrates this and discusses the consequences for how we think about world politics, covering disciplinary history, philosophies of social science, quantitative methods, studies of international institutions, and critical theory. It concludes by arguing that once we fully grasp the importance of timing and time for international politics, IR looks very different from conventional wisdoms about quantitative-qualitative, theory-narrative, general-particular, empirical-interpretive, or scientific-critical divides.

Learn more about International Relations and the Problem of Time at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

LaFleur Stephens-Dougan's "Race to the Bottom"

LaFleur Stephens-Dougan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Her research interests include public opinion, racial attitudes and voting behavior.

Stephens-Dougan applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work In American Politics, discusses the results of an survey experiment that was fielded on a nationally representative sample of 515 White respondents. Participants in the experiment were randomly assigned to read about a Black Democratic politician who had recently given a speech that encouraged people to get out and vote. There were three versions of the article, a deracialized version, an implicitly racial version, and an explicitly racial version. The aim here was to see whether some White voters would evaluate a Black candidate who did not mention race (deracialized message) more positively than a virtually identical Black Democratic candidate who did mention race, either implicitly or explicitly.

There is a long line of research that suggests that Black candidates should avoid the topic of race to allay the fears of White voters. This strategy, which is referred to as “deracialization,” presumes that if a Black politician is talking about race, then they are assuming a posture of racial liberalism that will turn off White voters. Less explored, is whether Black politicians are advantaged when they indicate that they are not “too liberal” on matters of race, by invoking negative stereotypes about other Black people—a strategy that I refer to as “racial distancing.”

The page 99 test works for Race to the Bottom because this page illuminates the central argument of the book, which is that racially moderate and racially conservative White Americans have a preference for politicians who distance themselves from the interests of Black people. The discussion on page 99 indicates that White voters in the sample were more likely to vote for the Black Democratic candidate in either the implicit or explicit versions of the article, relative to the Black Democratic candidate with the deracialized message. They also rated the racialized versions of the speech more positively. In other words, a message from a Black Democratic candidate that emphasized unity and universalism was actually less popular than messages that invoked stereotypes of Blacks as complaining and not taking personal responsibility. Since most White Americans are moderate to conservative on matters of race, this has troubling normative implications for the representation of Black interests in the American political system.

Visit LaFleur Stephens-Dougan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicolas Bommarito's "Seeing Clearly"

Nicolas Bommarito is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at University at Buffalo. Before that, he was a Bersoff Fellow in the philosophy department at NYU. He has also studied at Brown University, Tibet University, and University of Michigan. His research focuses on questions in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and Buddhist philosophy.

Bommarito applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test is a wonderful illustration of an important Buddhist idea. Page 99 of my book Seeing Clearly is about the Buddhist idea of the Two Truths. The basic idea is that some things are true within a system of conventions or assumptions, while others are true full stop. So it’s true within our conventional mythology that Santa wears a red suit since we've all agreed that is how the story goes. But it’s not ultimately true since there is no Santa (sorry, Virginia!) and so no suit at all.

Page 99 talks about a particular view of the Two Truths that sees them as identical, different aspects of the same reality. They are different aspects of the same thing the way a lemon is both yellow and sour. It then talks about the practical importance of thinking about the conventions and assumptions in place when we listen to what others say. This means reflecting on whether it would be wise in that situation to work within those conventions or break out of them. Do you insist that Santa does not have a red suit or sit back and have fun participating in the Christmas dinner conversation?

Buddhists who talk about the Two Truths often do so because they say that everything is empty. By that they mean empty of an independent essence. This means that everything depends on everything else to be what it is. The Page 99 Test itself is actually a wonderful illustration of this. To really explain what is happening on page 99, you have to explain what happened before and what happens after in the book. Understanding the significance of the page means understanding its place in the rest of the book.

Think about a melody you like. If you just take a single note from the middle of that melody on its own and ask, “Is this a good note?” it’s hard to say. This is because the note’s significance depends on the notes that come before and after and the timing of those notes. The same is true of page 99 or any other page of a book – trying to figure out what it says and how good it is means reflecting on what came before and what follows.

Reflecting on the relational nature of things is a central part of what the Page 99 Test forces you to do and it’s also of central importance in the Buddhist idea of emptiness. It might seem like you can pick out a single musical note or a page of a book and evaluate it as an isolated, stand-alone thing, but you can’t. In the same way, it can be tempting to think of events, people, and even ourselves in ways that abstract away from all of the relations and conditions that make these things what they are. For many Buddhists this view of things as independent and isolated things is the fundamental mistake that causes misery in life. The rest of my book is about how Buddhists take on the task of fixing that mistake, particular ideas and techniques they use to see clearly how the world really is and so become more compassionate and understanding.

Visit Nic Bommarito's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz's "Asian Place, Filipino Nation"

Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz is a research fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and is executive director of the Toynbee Prize Foundation. She holds a PhD in Southeast Asian and international history from Yale University.

CuUnjieng Aboitiz applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Phan Bội Châu did not believe in a racial hierarchy. He saw in Social Darwinism not an essentialist trap but a positive theory that explained a nation’s strength as the result of its historical development, thereby opening to any nation the opportunity to advance by developing itself... To Châu, a nation’s survival depended upon its struggle. This struggle needed not be borne alone. Kōtoku Shūsui and other Japanese thinkers as well as Liu Shipei—a Chinese intellectual with whom Châu was in contact—all drew upon Peter Kropotkin’s Social Darwinist theories of intra-species behavior. Kropotkin emphasized ‘mutual help’ among members of a species and argued for it as crucial to the species’ survival in nature’s harsh living conditions. For the Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese intellectuals who had internalized Social Darwinism as an explanation of the difference among nations (rather than as inequality existing within a single nation, as it was originally theorized in Europe), Kropotkin’s argument served to bridge Social Darwinism and Pan-Asianism. Phan Bội Châu wrote further in ‘Letter from Abroad Written in Blood’: ‘In this age when strong powers are competing against each other and the world is engaged in a struggle for survival, we would be a loser unless we absorb civilization from abroad, acquire sympathy from a strong neighbour, and pit our small nation against a big enemy.’

My book is a global intellectual history of the Philippine Revolution, and deals centrally with the emplotment of place in the political thought and actions of the Philippine ilustrados (educated elite) and revolutionaries as they constructed the idea of the Philippine nation. To understand this history I examined the Filipinos’ constructions of ‘place,’ ‘Asia,’ the Malay race, and civilization. While my book centers on the Philippines, it has an eye toward Vietnam throughout. It examines East-East or intra-Global South relations and exchange within a period of history that is too often apprehended through bilateral accounts privileging relations between the West and an Asian country. It is in this light that the contemporaneous Vietnamese engagement with Pan-Asianism and Social Darwinism becomes relevant. It is also through the Vietnamese and Philippine histories taken together that I recover and distinguish the Pan-Asianism of the colonized “periphery” as distinct from that of the “center” of Northeast Asia. I incorporate the “periphery” into our understanding of Pan-Asianism and focus on its affective and material dimensions, which the traditional intellectual and Northeast Asia-centric scholarship tends to miss.

The diverse islands of Filipinas* are riven with ethno-linguistic variety and the contours of what would become the Philippine nation-state were in no way presumed. It seemed to me that a thorough investigation of the geographies of political affinity and constructions of place at work in the history of the revolution remained sorely missing. What is Southeast Asia? For that matter, what is Asia? Existing at the “periphery” of both, the Philippines is a singularly rich site to explore such questions. Beyond merely the Philippines, I wondered, how do anti-colonial and proto-nationalist constructions of ‘place’ relate theoretically and genealogically to empire and its claims to space? Further, how did they relate to the multivalent discourses on race?

Indeed, observers around the globe at the turn of the twentieth century—from Spain, to India, and Japan—were convinced that they were on the precipice of a coming race war. Social Darwinist frameworks only worked to naturalize that idea of international racial struggle, and, as a result, could portray Asian racial solidarity as both necessary and existential to the anti-colonial nationalist struggles then brewing and ablaze in the region.

*I use the contemporary name of the Spanish colony when discussing the archipelago prior to the idea of the Filipino nation and when discussing the colony as distinct from the imagination of that nation.

Learn more about Asian Place, Filipino Nation at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seyward Darby's "Sisters in Hate"

Seyward Darby is the editor in chief of The Atavist Magazine. She previously served as the deputy editor of Foreign Policy and the online editor and assistant managing editor of The New Republic. As a writer, she has contributed to The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Elle, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.

Darby applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Sisters in Hate, you'll find the following lines.

By the time Unite the Right was on the horizon, Ayla was staging an increasingly exaggerated performance of good white womanhood.... [I]f being vocally nostalgic for the past was a sin, Ayla wasn’t about to repent. Invoking ideals of femininity rooted in whiteness—Beyoncé need not apply—Ayla compared the America she yearned for to the world of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, the twin teenage protagonists created by young-adult author Francine Pascal.

Page 99 is a good representation of the book overall, hitting on the key topics of whiteness and womanhood and on their intersection, which as the text implies is often weaponized in the service of white supremacy. The page also shows what I hope is among the book’s strongest qualities: the interweaving of personal stories with historical and cultural analysis.

Coded language is a hallmark of the hate movement. Today, there’s a veritable dictionary of strange digital lingo, from “cuckservative” to “libtard,” “kangz” to “roastie,” that is used to insult people who don’t support the far right or live up to its racist, misogynistic, and ant-Semitic standards. I’m more interested, however, in words like “heritage” and “the West” and even “American,” which when used by hate’s acolytes contain multitudes far uglier than a surface-level reading suggests. This kind of coding is one way that the hate movement’s supporters and ideas seep into the mainstream, because it allows them to present what they believe and do as palatable, defensible, and familiar.

Page 99 of my book points to the ways in which women are uniquely positioned to use coding as both a shield and a weapon. In performing or invoking “womanhood” and “motherhood,” women in the hate movement seek to deflect criticism and invite sympathy. Simultaneously, they judge and exclude, because the concepts in question are, to their minds, defined by whiteness—a measure of power, normative behavior, and aesthetics at odds with progressive ideals like racial justice.

Visit Seyward Darby's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miles Harvey's "The King of Confidence"

Miles Harvey is the author of the national and international bestseller The Island of Lost Maps and the recipient of a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan. His book Painter in a Savage Land was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year and a Booklist Editors’ Choice. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books.

Harvey applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch, and reported the following:

The King of Confidence tells the stranger-than-fiction story of James J. Strang, a self-declared prophet who convinced hundreds of mid-19th-century Americans to move with him to a remote island in northernmost Lake Michigan, where he declared himself King of Earth and Heaven. Page 99 describes an anguishing moment in the troubled existence of his wife, Mary Perce Strang.

In the fall of 1849, the prophet dropped off Mary and the couple’s three young children at his parents’ farm in Western New York. He then proceeded to go on a months-long recruiting and fundraising tour of the East Coast, accompanied by someone named Charles J. Douglass, whom Strang introduced to anyone he came in contact with as his 16-year-old nephew and private secretary. But in fact, Charley wasn’t a man at all. His real name was Elvira Field, and she was Strang’s 19-year-old second wife in men’s clothing—a secret the prophet hoped to keep from Mary, who did not yet know that her husband had become a polygamist. By the time of his murder by disaffected followers in 1856, Strang would have a total of five wives.

Page 99 describes the miserable conditions most married women faced in the antebellum era, that tumultuous period of American history leading up to the Civil War. The page starts with a frustrated Mary writing her husband, who had largely ignored her earlier letters. “If I had money,” she angrily declared, “I would take the children and go home” to Wisconsin, where the family was then living. The text on page 99 then continues: “But Mary Strang couldn’t go home. Like most women of her generation, she had almost no real power in her marriage, much less anything resembling autonomy. Although a few states such as New York had passed laws that granted limited economic rights to married women, most jurisdictions still held that a husband owned his wife’s body, her property, her earnings, and her offspring. ... If Strang’s intention had been to cut her off from the outside world, he could hardly have devised a better prison than his parents’ house, where Mary could neither get news of his travels nor be exposed to gossip.”

It’s hard to say that this passage gets a perfect score on The Page 99 Test, since readers don’t get a direct glimpse of Strang. But even though the prophet is absent from this particular page, readers get a very clear sense of one of his defining character traits: duplicity. The term “confidence man” came into the American lexicon that very same year of 1849, and Strang certainly fit the bill. Readers also get a feel for the upheavals of the mid-19th century, a time that gave rise to many feverish religious enthusiasms and powerful political movements. The final paragraph of page 99, for instance, explores the strikingly prescient ideas of the noted antebellum essayist and journalist Margaret Fuller, whose 1845 book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century was described by one later historian as “the boldest and, in a real sense, the first statement of American feminism.” Fuller argued that the place women of the era occupied was “so narrow” that any attempt to break out would cause them to “become outlaws.” Men, too, were stunted by the rigid gender divisions of the antebellum period, which, in Fuller’s view, imprisoned members of both sexes and suppressed their true selves from soaring free. She looked forward to a time when false borders between the two genders faded away. “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism,” she wrote. “But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

The surprisingly complex gender politics of the antebellum era—and of Strang’s utopian colony, where women were wearing pantaloons almost a year before women’s rights advocate Amelia Bloomer famously adopted the fashion—were among the most fascinating aspects of researching and writing The King of Confidence.

Visit Miles Harvey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roger Moorhouse's "Poland 1939"

Roger Moorhouse studied history at the University of London and is a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw. He is the author of several books on World War II history, including Berlin at War (shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman Prize) and The Devils’ Alliance. He lives in the United Kingdom.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II, and reported the following:

I love the premise of the Page 99 Test, and the idea that a single page – any page – might serve as a microcosm of the whole book. In this case, I think it works quite well.

My new book Poland 1939 is about the brutal German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939, which ignited World War Two in Europe and showed so many of the hideous features that would become so commonplace in the war – the targeting of civilians, indiscriminate bombing and the application of murderous ideologies.

Page 99 of the book gives a rather different aspect, but one which is nonetheless significant. As it happens, half of the page contains a picture, showing jubilant Poles celebrating in the streets of Warsaw after the British and French had declared war on Germany, in their defence, on September 3 1939.

The accompanying text tells the story of the British Ambassador to Poland, Sir Howard Kennard, meeting the Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, at the British Embassy. It explains that the jubilant crowd was so thick that Beck had to fight his way through, and that the two men then addressed the throng from the balcony, with Kennard proudly proclaiming that Britain would “fight side by side” with Poland against aggression and injustice.

Those that understand something of the story already, will know that those earnest promises of assistance on the part of London and Paris amounted to very little indeed. Despite the warm words of encouragement and the exhortations to resist, Poland was pretty much left to its fate by its western Allies, and was defeated, partitioned and destroyed by its totalitarian neighbours after 5 weeks of warfare.

This, then, is the story of Page 99. The test doesn’t work perfectly, as the page isn’t really indicative of the main body of the book, but it does nonetheless explain an aspect that – while slightly tangential – is an important part of the wider story; the story of the British and French abandonment, and betrayal, of their Polish ally.

©Roger Moorhouse 2020

Visit Roger Moorhouse's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Devils' Alliance.

--Marshal Zeringue