R. Isabela Morales's "Happy Dreams of Liberty"

R. Isabela Morales is a public historian based in New Jersey. She is the Editor and Project Manager of Princeton University's expansive public history initiative, The Princeton & Slavery Project; her research for the project has been featured in the New York Times. She is also the Digital Projects Manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, central New Jersey's first Black history museum.

Morales received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2019, specializing in the 19th-century United States, slavery, and emancipation.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, and reported the following:

Page 99, near the middle of my book, opens at a critical moment in the Townsends' lives: the first stirrings of civil war. When the family was freed in early 1860, they expected that they would soon receive the inheritance that would help them complete their education, buy land and homes, and start new lives as free people in Ohio and Kansas. Yet when Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860 and southern states responded by seceding from the Union, the Townsends saw their dreams of financial security begin to slip away.

With war looming, the estate Cabaniss once considered 'abundantly solvent' was at risk. Three days after Lincoln's election, the lawyer wrote a Mississippi planter that he was 'almost in despair' over the state of the country. With an antislavery president in office and Alabama likely to secede, Cabaniss 'entertained some doubts as to the propriety of proceeding with the sale' of the rest of Samuel Townsend's land and slaves. ... He had already sold land and slaves on credit; if he made the wrong decision now, the Townsends might never receive their full inheritance.

The Townsends' father, the wealthy Alabama cotton planter Samuel Townsend, had promised his once-enslaved children equal shares in his $200,000 fortune. With the outbreak of the Civil War, however, the Townsends were cut off from communication with Samuel's attorney S. D. Cabaniss, who managed the estate, and Cabaniss wouldn't be able to send the Townsends money from their inheritance for the next five years. This was a turning point in the Townsends' lives, as well as the lives of millions of Americans who would be affected by the Civil War.

Page 99 also points to the problematic origins of the freed Townsends' inheritance. The fortune Samuel's children hoped to inherit one day had been built by slave labor, as well as the sale of other enslaved people who weren't related to their master by blood. In some ways, the Townsends' inheritance looks like wealth redistribution: from an enslaver to the enslaved people he once owned. But that wealth was built on exploitation, and the Townsends were beneficiaries of that system too. It's just one example of the complexity of the Townsends' lives and experiences that I explore in Happy Dreams of Liberty.

Visit R. Isabela Morales's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Craddock's "Spare Parts"

Paul Craddock is a cultural historian and award-winning author based in London. His debut book, Spare Parts: A Surprising History of Transplants was a Daily Mail Book of the Week and won the Special Commendation of the Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Awards.

Craddock is a Science Museum Group Senior Research Associate (SMGSRA), an Honorary Senior Research Associate of UCL’s Division of Surgery, and a Visiting Lecturer at Imperial College London.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Spare Parts and reported the following:

Page 99 of Spare Parts is largely dedicated to an etching from 1705, of a blood transfusion from a lamb to a man. The slither of text below the image is the beginning of an introduction to George Acton, a sixteenth-century English doctor who proposed that you might treat epilepsy with a transfusion of cat’s blood.

In a way, page 99 gives a rather good idea of what Spare Parts is about. Most people think transplant surgery and transfusion are twentieth-century inventions, and the excerpt introduces some of the seventeenth-century ideas about transplants. My book is all about surprises (in fact, its subtitle in the UK is ‘the surprising history of transplants’), and this is certainly one of those. It’s complete with an image showing a rather disturbed man looking away as a transfusionist sees to his operation. His donor – the lamb – is looking similarly disturbed with an almost human face, and is looking away in the opposite direction. It looks simultaneously macabre and hilarious. And this is another way page 99 is indicative of the whole: Much of the history in Spare Parts feels incredibly silly, at least to someone with a British sense of humour. The idea of transfusion itself isn’t funny, of course, but we can affectionately chuckle at scientists earnestly assuming that a transfusion recipient might turn into a sheep. There’s some evidence, in fact, that people at the time loved to laugh at such silliness – plays were written poking fun at scientists for such outlandish suggestions, as playwrights created characters who had transfusions in order to transform into various creatures. So, the test worked in those few ways: it’s indicative of the kind of story a browser will come across, it gives an impression of the sheer age of transplant surgery as a medical idea, and it presents something of the inherent creativity and quirkiness in the history of this remarkable surgery.

Visit Paul Craddock's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini's "Infected Empires"

Patricia Saldarriaga is a professor of Luso-Hispanic studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is the author of Los espacios del ‘Primero Sueño’ de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and co-editor (with M. Júdice, I. Araújo-Branco, and R. Marques) of Sor Juana e Portugal. Emy Manini is an independent scholar based in Seattle, Washington.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book is a fractional but representative snapshot of the entirety of our book. We discuss the Peruvian film The Year of the Apocalypse (El año del apocalipsis) and a plot point in which a group of young adult survivors of a zombie outbreak decide to sacrifice the children and elderly people they have been tasked with protecting when they are under attack. They do this in order to give themselves, the supposedly stronger, healthier, and abler demographic, a better chance of survival. From our page: “For this generation, the future is the present moment, and only by eliminating the children (of the future) and the elderly (of the past) will they be able to survive… They decide that, due to their respective ages, the elderly and the children are disabled, and so they poison them to control their present moment.” We refer to the “strange temporalities” proposed by J. Halberstam, in which the emergency of the AIDS era brought focus to the present moment instead of a long future life and the idea of futurity itself. The young adults in the film are rejecting a queer and crip temporality that goes beyond the idea of ableist and heteronormative narratives about the future. We liken this mindset to the way young, “healthier,” lives were valued over “disposable” elderly, poor, and immunocompromised subjects during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our page 99 ends by introducing the notion of an inclusive futurity, which we later go on to propose must consider the union of queer temporality and crip time to include intersectionalities of gender, disability, race, and class.

We believe this page is a good example of how we analyze global zombie narratives presented in films from around the world to examine what they tell us about how we understand the world we live in, how we came to this historical moment, and how we can navigate our anxieties about an apocalyptic future that are expressed by these films. Of course, it is only one example in a book that contains hundreds, and so it is not a complete view of our broader project. However, the example of page 99 is a good indicator of our methods and interests.

We study the zombie as a transnational cinematic phenomenon. We begin with an in-depth study of the ontology of the zombie and the decolonization of the soul, something that we trace back to classical philosophy. We go on to make connections between the zombie myth born in colonialism and the epistemic violence that enforces the continuation of coloniality of thought that props up the structure of the modern nation-state. We also consider the ways in which capital maintains coloniality over bodies and lives, even unto death. Therefore, we look at zombies as subjects of gore capitalism (as proposed by Sayak Valencia), as dead bodies and commodities that resist their economic exploitation through necroactivism. We study the zombie in its current expressions of difference and otherness, across categories of race, nationality, gender, class, dis/ability, and sexuality, in terms of how zombie narratives reflect real-world events. For example, we question categories of ability (especially under the weight of the global COVID emergency) and look at zombies as expressions of anxieties during Trump era immigration policies. It is our assertion that zombie films illustrate the consequences of oppressive societal systems including capitalism, globalization, as well as environmental, immigration and health policies. These films use horror to emphasize the traces of affects in humanity which allow for the visualization and understanding of historical apocalyptic moments and the means of moving past them towards the sort of futurity proposed on our page 99. In this way, the page delivers a dismembered slice of the fuller corpus of our book!

Learn more about Infected Empires at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathryn S. Olmsted's "The Newspaper Axis"

Kathryn S. Olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism.

Olmsted applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works remarkably well for my book. The Newspaper Axis examines the Anglo-American media environment in which Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler came to power in the 1930s. In both the U.S. and the U.K., the most powerful media moguls dismissed or appeased Hitler—and in some cases, even published pro-fascist propaganda. Page 99 of the book details the efforts by two of these newspaper publishers, Joe Patterson of the New York Daily News and Lord Beaverbrook of the London Daily Express, which were the most popular papers in their respective nations, to engineer an Anglo-American campaign to ignore Hitler’s aggression. They agreed to publish front-page editorials, public letters, news articles, and letters to the editor to encourage their readers to support the cause of isolationism. As I write on page 99, “The Daily Express ran a story about how the Daily News was printing letters from Express readers about the Express stories about the Daily News. The two publishers created a transatlantic isolationist media echo chamber.”

It is this alliance between the U.S. and U.K. newspaper publishers that I refer to as the “newspaper axis.” I didn’t invent the term: one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s top advisers, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, used it to describe the American isolationist newspaper publishers. But I believe that the phrase captures the transnational cooperation between the media barons of both nations, and page 99 explains the details of their alliance.

These publishers helped shape the responses of their governments to fascist aggression. The six press barons I examine in the book collectively reached tens of millions of readers. Their willingness to appease or even praise the Nazi leader made it much more difficult for their nation’s elected officials to stand up to the fascist threat. The book shows that the embrace of authoritarian dictators by today’s right-wing media has deep roots in the past.

Learn more about The Newspaper Axis at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Neall W. Pogue's "The Nature of the Religious Right"

Neall W. Pogue is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Dallas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement, and reported the following:

Page 99 demonstrates that Christian school educational material written in the 1980s by religious right supporters championed the views of famous preservationist John Muir. In the Christian schoolbook, Muir stops his money hungry father from chopping down all the trees on their farm. The Nature of the Religious Right illustration/photo section additionally features reprinted pages of this story about Muir, which can be located just before chapter 5 that begins on page 109.

The final paragraph on page 99 connects the Muir’s story with a previously discussed idea called Christian environmental stewardship. The analysis explains that Christian environmental stewardship is a theologically based perspective in which humanity was mandated by God to treat nature with respect even if it meant curbing financial gain. Such a moral is directly reflected by the story of Muir.

In summary, page 99 offers hard evidence of the book’s overall thesis that conservative evangelicals of the religious right surprisingly supported eco-friendly philosophies from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Thus, although today this important American religious and political demographic stands in opposition to environmental initiatives, history shows they once held much friendlier views of nature.

In short, page 99 gives the reader a very good idea of the whole book. It demonstrates that religious right supporters, who wrote Christian school material, supported protecting the environment even if it meant curbing financial profits. Such a perspective nicely reflects the book’s thesis that conservative evangelicals of the religious right believed that humanity could use nature but must do it wisely because the earth is owned by God.

It is recommended, however, that one should read the introduction of The Nature of the Religious Right to clearly understand conservative evangelical culture and the book’s overall thesis. Nevertheless, the analysis of the Muir story on page 99 nicely reflects the book’s overall message.

The Nature of the Religious Right can help save our planet and therefore our survival as a species.

The book proves that conservative evangelicals of the religious right actually supported eco-friendly initiatives from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Such a fact suggests that bridges of communication can be built between environmentalists and supporters of the religious right movement.

After all, this book is dedicated to “conservative evangelicals and environmentalists.” The information could, in other words, be used to assist in healing political divides, which if accomplished, can help protect the earth.

Learn more about The Nature of the Religious Right at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David E. Gussak's "The Frenzied Dance of Art and Violence"

David E. Gussak is Professor for the Florida State University's Graduate Art Therapy Program and the Project Coordinator for the FSU/FL Department of Correction's Art Therapy in Prisons program. As an art therapist for almost 30 years, Gussak has presented and published extensively internationally and nationally on forensic art therapy and art therapy in forensic settings. These include, among others, Art on Trial (2015) and Art and Art Therapy with the Imprisoned (2019). He is also the co-editor, with Marcia Rosal, and contributing author for The Wiley Handbook of Art Therapy (2015).

Gussak applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Frenzied Dance of Art and Violence, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Frenzied Dance of Art and Violence is in the middle of chapter 2 which features artists impacted by situational and societal violence whose work seemed to emerge from a need of comprehension, control and resistance. The top half of this page is filled with Felix Nussbaum’s final painting, Death Triumphant, created shortly before he was arrested, deported and ultimately murdered by the Nazi regime. Yet the text on the page primarily refers to his self-portrait that appears on the previous page which conveys “…a sense of furtive insolence, the subject doing everything he can to maintain his humanity and identity [in the face of violent oppression]. Unfortunately, it is already too late.” The bottom of the page begins its reflections of Death Triumphant, which “depicts many skeletons playing and dancing to music among the ruins,” concluding its summary on the following page, ultimately reminding the reader “[i]n destruction nothing is sacred; all will eventually disappear.”

This page is paradoxically an excellent encapsulation and a meagre fragment of the entire book—it captures its essence, illustrating in depth the infamous work of one of many featured artists, relying on it to help tell his volatile story. Like all of the examinations throughout, it reflects deeply on the artist’s work to convey how it might reflect, contain, resist or sublimate their violent tendencies or volatile experiences. Yet it is just one of 85 examples depicted throughout, either by notoriously aggressive and violent creators, courageous resistors, psychopathic murderers who wielded their art as a weapon, or those whose creations facilitated peace and well-being for even the most incorrigible.

This page does indeed underscore the role that art has in maintaining and reinforcing one’s identity in the face of barbarism, and the artists’ ability to exhibit and express the volatility held within and experienced without. Yet, in exploring the complex interrelationship between art and violence, the book can’t help but provide an intricate, complicated and thought-provoking examination. Thus, while this single page can help draw the reader in and provide a sense of the book’s narrative rhythm, it can’t fully contain in a nice, neat parcel the frenzy ensued within.

Follow Dave Gussak on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charlotte Mullins's "A Little History of Art"

Charlotte Mullins is an art critic, writer and broadcaster. Currently art critic at Country Life, she was formerly editor of Art Review, V&A Magazine, and Art Quarterly. She has published over a dozen books on visual art.

Mullins applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Little History of Art, and reported the following:

When I opened my book at page 99 I felt short-changed: page 99 falls at the end of Chapter 13 and as such there are only a few lines of print. That said, page 99 is an interesting moment in the book. It is the end of the chapter ‘East Meets West’, which looks at the multicultural city of Venice in the fifteenth century and its relationship with Constantinople (now Istanbul). Page 99 also introduces us to three of the biggest superstars of the age:

Venice was a melting pot of nationalities and cultures, with diverse and wealthy patrons who commissioned great art. Most Venetian artists felt no need to travel to other city-states to look for work but this was not the case elsewhere in Italy. Increasingly many of Italy’s most ambitious artists chose to move to Rome to try to work for the Pope. In the next chapter we will follow three of the greatest Renaissance artists as they all leave the city of Florence for lucrative commissions. These artists are so familiar to us today that we know them simply by their first names: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael.

Page 99 does give you a flavour of the book’s accessible style and hopefully shows you that this book is packed full of context and content. That said, what page 99 doesn’t do is show the diversity of this book – and perhaps no single page could do this. For this book covers 100,000 years of art history. It travels from caves in Indonesia to Assyrian palaces, Chinese tombs to Peruvian plains. It covers monumental sculptures from Rapa Nui, the Terracotta Army, a urinal exhibited as art and the whole cast of a house. It features miniature paintings and murals, prints and videos and art made entirely of ideas. It covers cultural exchange, colonialism and slavery as well as abstraction, figuration and everything in-between.

Perhaps a line from page 4 ultimately sums up the book’s goal: ‘We will roam the world together, reinstating forgotten artists and expanding the traditional view of art history.’ So while page 99 introduces the Renaissance greats of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael there are hundreds of less well known but brilliant artists to explore on the other pages of A Little History of Art.

Visit Charlotte Mullins's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David L. Sloss's "Tyrants on Twitter"

David L. Sloss is the John A. and Elizabeth H. Sutro Professor of Law at Santa Clara University. He is the author of The Death of Treaty Supremacy: An Invisible Constitutional Change (2016). Before entering academia, he worked for the U.S. government on drafting and negotiating arms control treaties.

Sloss applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare, and reported the following:

Proponents of the Page 99 Test claim that if a reader opens the book to page ninety-nine, “the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."

That claim is partly true for my book, but not entirely true. Page ninety-nine is included in a chapter on China. The chapter analyzes China’s information warfare strategy and tactics. The first part of page ninety-nine includes the final paragraph of a section examining how China exploited its worldwide media empire to spread propaganda about Covid-19 to a global audience. The second part of the page includes the opening paragraph of a section that analyzes China’s use of information warfare tactics to meddle in established democracies.

Page ninety-nine presents some data on death rates from Covid-19, showing that—as of November 2020—China had far fewer deaths per 100,000 population than most western democracies. Page ninety-nine says:

To some extent, the published data may simply indicate that China’s dictatorship is better able to suppress truthful information than Western democracies. However, even if the actual numbers from China are ten times higher than the reported numbers, it would still be true that China has done a better job protecting its people from Covid-19 than many Western democracies. Thus, the data about Covid-19 illustrates a basic point about information competition. If the United States and like-minded countries want to win the battle of ideas between democracy and authoritarianism, liberal democratic governments need to do a better job promoting the welfare of their citizens, not just in terms of individual liberty, but also in terms of health, safety, and economic security.

The book as a whole presents a deep dive into Chinese and Russian information warfare tactics. Page ninety-nine provides a nice illustration of that deep dive. However, the book also has two other key elements that the reader will not see on page ninety-nine. First, the book situates information warfare in a broader strategic context, explaining how Chinese and Russian information warfare relates to the ongoing geopolitical competition between democracies and autocracies. Second, the book presents a detailed policy proposal for cooperation among liberal democracies; it recommends a new system for transnational regulation of social media to protect democracies from Chinese and Russian information warfare.

Follow David L. Sloss on Twitter and learn more about Tyrants on Twitter at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen C. Angle's "Growing Moral"

Stephen C. Angle received his B.A. from Yale University in East Asian Studies and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. Since 1994 he has taught at Wesleyan University, where he is now Director of the Fries Center for Global Studies, Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies, and Professor of Philosophy. The author of several previous books on Confucianism, Angle has co-directed two NEH Summer Institutes and is a recipient of two Fulbright grants, a Berggruen Fellowship, a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship, and a Chiang Ching-Kuo Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. In 2006 he was awarded Wesleyan's Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Angle applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works. A reader starting Growing Moral on page 99 might flounder initially, since the first line uses unfamiliar terms like “Neo-Confucian” and “heartmind.” But bear with it for a moment, and things fall into place:

…later Neo-Confucian explains it, the heartmind’s having a master is like when the master of the house is at home. When the master is at home things are naturally in order and chaotic outsiders are prevented from entering the house—even without the master’s actively warding them away. Similarly, when one is attuned to the broad significance of any given affair, then “chaos”—that is, selfish concerns—cannot enter one’s heartmind.

Readers will note that page 99 is part of a chapter called “Pay Attention,” and here we see that when you’re paying attention in such a way as to be “attuned” to something’s “broad significance,” the result is that selfishness is barred from affecting you.

The rest of the page puts this in terms of “reverential attention”:

Reverential attention, then, means to attend to all that one encounters in daily life and to do so from a stance of reverence for interconnected life. We all know people who pay careful attention to their surroundings, but for some reason do so in order to seek out flaws, to nitpick, to undermine. To pay reverential attention is instead to notice and look to reinforce care for life, care for others, and care for the self. We can think of this as looking for harmony. This does not mean that one is actively steering what one sees. Rather, one is looking for harmony in the sense that one is primed to see and react favorably to opportunities for harmony—ways that things fit together well—because even as one is attending single-mindedly to a particular person or thing, in all their distinctness, this will simultaneously include being aware of their interdependence with the entire context.

Reverence, harmony, caring, interdependence: these are easy values to grasp, even if one had no idea that they were central to Confucianism, nor that they could be combined in quite this way. The rest of the page makes the relevance of this ideas to our modern lives even more explicit:

Skilled managers of any kind of team do this all the time, taking seriously their interactions with each team member while simultaneously noting possible ways in which members can work together even better. Perhaps there’s a way to adjust roles so that each finds their responsibilities even more satisfying, or perhaps there’s some misunderstanding the manager notices that, when cleared up, will help colleagues work together more fluidly.

By the end of page 99, we’ve not only made sense of initially unfamiliar ideas, but done so in a way that might have a lesson to teach us in our lives today.

Read in this way, page 99 turns out to be a microcosm of the whole book. It’s meant to feel at least a little strange, at least for those not already familiar with the 3000-year tradition of Confucianism. After all, if all the values and ideas fit perfectly into mental categories you already have, what would there be to gain from considering a Confucian way of life? At the same time, Confucius and his heirs were writing for people who experienced their world and its challenges in fundamentally the same way as other people do, so it should be no shock to discover that their writings resonate with us. Growing Moral tells its readers what to do, if they want to try out a Confucian life, and why such a life is valuable.

Learn more about Growing Moral at the Oxford University Press website, and visit the Warp, Weft, and Way website for information about Chinese and Comparative philosophy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Avram Alpert's "The Good-Enough Life"

Avram Alpert is a writer, educator, and organizer working to understand what values we can live by in a world as connected, chaotic, and potentially catastrophic as the present. He is currently researching for a new book about what it might mean to be wise in such a world, as well working on several related creative writing projects. Beginning in May 2022, he will be a Fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg. Alpert's first book, Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki was published in 2019. A second book, A Partial Enlightenment: What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us About Living Well without Perfection was published in 2021. His third book, The Good-Enough Life, is out this month.

Alpert applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Good-Enough Life and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, I am discussing what a “good-enough” relationship looks like. For me being good enough in a relationship does not mean just doing the bare minimum, but rather requires us to provide both goodness and enoughness (sufficient emotional support) to our friends, family, and others. Moreover, it requires us to embrace our inevitable limitations in attempting to do so. It thus requires us to abandon the allure of what I call “greatness,” or being the best at something in a competitive system. I write:

We can reimagine the types of people we want to be for each other. We can realize that being the good-enough parent or friend or lover is difficult and unparalleled in its offering. If I have been a good-enough friend or lover or son in my life, it is when I have managed to resist the various temptations of greatness. I have given what I can of myself without doing so much that I burn out. I have accepted the failings of my loved ones and been open and honest about my own limitations. I have recognized those moments when more than ordinary care is called for, and I have been able to ask for or offer extra attention without expectation of incessant increase. I have not imagined that I alone have the perfect solution to every problem we confront, but a humble position that will only be meaningful if it speaks to every one’s needs and concerns. I have encouraged those around me to find meaning and purpose in creating a good-enough world for all, not seeking to get a piece of greatness for themselves.

In terms of communicating the overall message of the book, this page does, well, good-enough! It hardly captures the entirety of the argument, but it does offer a decent overview of the book’s major themes and concerns. It lays out my argument that a good-enough life is one that is rich with nuance and complexity, while avoiding the false allures of perfectionism. A reader just picking up the book here would likely be a little confused by the terminology: many of the preceding pages explain what precisely I mean by “good enough,” “a good-enough world for all,” and “greatness.” But they could probably surmise the basic themes and concerns.

The book is structured as a series of concentric circles as it passes through what a good-enough life means for individuals, relationships, society, and nature. A reader just looking at this passage might think the book only focused on relationships and was perhaps even autobiographical. While I do tell stories about myself throughout the chapters, I am certainly not the focus of the book, which offers a wide-ranging analysis of psychology, philosophy, popular culture, and evolution, among other themes.

Across its pages, The Good-Enough Life argues that we would be healthier, happier, and more relaxed if we embraced imperfection (only ever good enough) without giving up on decency (goodness) and sufficiency (enoughness) for everyone, including the natural world. I argue that this is an inspiring goal that would lead many more people to be involved in society and feel respected and rewarded for their various endeavors. Perhaps like with the Page 99 Test itself, in the good-enough life not everything works out, but it still offers us insights and pleasures that cannot be found if we are only satisfied with perfection.

Visit Avram Alpert's website.

--Marshal Zeringue