Dean Jobb's "A Gentleman and a Thief"

Dean Jobb is the author of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream, winner of the inaugural CrimeCon CLUE Award for true crime book of the year and longlisted for the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His previous books include Empire of Deception, which the New York Times Book Review called “intoxicating and impressively researched” and the Chicago Writers Association named the Nonfiction Book of the Year. Esquire magazine has hailed him as “a master of narrative nonfiction.” Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune and Toronto’s Globe and Mail and his monthly true crime column, “Stranger Than Fiction,” appears in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He is a professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program.

Jobb applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“He was dressed to blend in with the posh surroundings, in a blue suit, pearl-gray tie, and black homburg. A brown leather briefcase completed the businessman-arriving-home look.” Arthur Barry, a clever and prolific Jazz Age crook – Life magazine later proclaimed him “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived” – was about to pull off the most audacious heist of his seven-year-reign as the king of New York’s cat burglars.

Page 99 of my latest true crime book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, published by Algonquin Books in the U.S. and by HarperCollins Canada, plunges readers into the heart of the action. It’s 1925 and Barry is about to slip into a suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel and escape with a strand of pearls and other jewelry worth millions. His victim? Heiress Jessie Donahue, daughter of the founder of the Woolworth chain of five-and-dime stores and one of the wealthiest women in the country. For this book, the Page 99 Test works – readers who turn to this page first will catch the master burglar in the act.

Barry pulled off scores of meticulously planned break-ins on Long Island and in Westchester County, targeting the mansions and sprawling estates of New York’s ultra-rich. His victims included Percy Rockefeller, nephew of the founder of Standard Oil, Wall Street investment legend Jesse Livermore, and Oklahoma oil tycoon Joshua Cosden. When the Prince of Wales visited Long Island in 1924, he took the future King Edward VIII on a clandestine tour of Manhattan nightclubs, then stole jewelry from a member of the prince’s entourage, Lady Edwina Mountbatten.

The press dubbed him a “gentlemanly thief.” Barry sometimes donned a tuxedo and crashed parties, passing himself off as an invited guest before slipping upstairs to check out where jewels were likely to be stashed when he returned to break in. If his victims were awakened as he crept into their bedrooms, he assured them he was only there for the jewels and engaged in small talk to calm them down. Dorothea Livermore, wife of the Wall Street investor, convinced him to return two valuable rings he was about to take, claiming they had sentimental value. “I know he’s terrible,” she later told reporters, “but isn’t he charming?”

Barry’s haul of diamonds, pearls and other gems would have been worth at least $60 million today. His arrest in 1927 was not the end of his incredible story. A dramatic prison break, years as a fugitive, and a final shot at redemption lay in the future.

Visit Dean Jobb's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William T. Taylor's "Hoof Beats"

William T. Taylor is an Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, whose work explores the domestication of the horse and the ancient relationships between people and animals.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, and reported the following:

The reader flipping to page 99 of Hoof Beats will encounter a two-page map spread showing how horses and horse riding spread out of Inner Asia and into Africa, and the links and trade routes created by the Silk Road, Tea Horse Road, and steppe empires. This moment in the book also marks a key turning point in the human-horse story, as the narrative shifts from an investigation into the origins of horse domestication to an exploration of the dynamic ways that horse riding built steppe empires and forged new links across the ancient world.

Turning past page 99, the reader will find themselves knee-deep in an exposition of ancient archaeological discoveries from Mongolia, the focus of my own work and the core of the book’s new scholarship. The Mongolian steppes served as the staging ground for many of the most important changes to people, horses and the ancient world – from the innovation of the saddle and stirrup to the emergence of pan-Eurasian empires and early global trade routes. I think the Page 99 Test nicely encapsulates the role of visual storytelling in Hoof Beats, and the integrated, global perspective that the book takes to understanding the human-horse relationship.

Visit William T. Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods's "Puppy Kindergarten"

Brian Hare is a professor in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, where he founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center. Vanessa Woods is a research scientist at the Center as well as an award-winning journalist and the author of Bonobo Handshake. Hare and Woods are married and live in North Carolina. They are the authors of Survival of the Friendliest and The Genius of Dogs.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Puppy Kindergarten: The New Science of Raising a Great Dog, and reported the following:

Sadly, page 99 is one of the very few pages that does not have a puppy photo, or even mention a puppy!!

It does distill a hotly debated, poorly understood, and complicated subject into a few paragraphs – how cognition and temperament fit into personality. The most helpful line I read when trying to wrestle with this topic was as psychologist David Rettew described it; if your personality is a symphony, your temperament is the key in which the symphony is played.

If I could, I would make it ‘the page 100 test’ because rapidly on the heels of page 99 comes one of my favorite tests with puppies—how they react to toy robots. Basically, we introduce puppies to various life-sized robots, some of whom dance and sing, and record what happens.

It’s a classic temperament test; psychologists have conducted similar tests with children for decades. Since your temperament is with you from a very young age and remains relatively stable, your reaction to something surprising and new when you are young can predict, to some extent, what you will be like when you get older.

We want to see if the same is true for puppies. Some puppies are friendly and kind to the robot, maybe making a deep play bow and sniffing its bottom. Other puppies are alarmed and confused and quickly ask to leave.

Watching the different puppies react to the robot and pairing this with their cognition emphasizes how each puppy is unique. This is probably one of my favorite lessons in our book - that just like kids, puppies all see the world and solve problems differently.

Visit Brian Hare's website and Vanessa Woods's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Genius of Dogs.

The Page 99 Test: Survival of the Friendliest.

--Marshal Zeringue

On Barak's "Heat, a History"

On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology and Professor of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His books include Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization.

Barak applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet, and reported the following:

Climate scientists dread vicious cycles – biophysical feedback loops that could accelerate climate change and push the Earth's system past critical tipping points. (These include melting ice exposing darker, heat-absorbing surfaces; thawing permafrost releasing greenhouse gases; and deforestation reducing carbon sequestration.) But if climate change is human-caused, what about the social and political dynamics propelling it? My book explores such cycles forming during the twentieth century and page 99 captures one of them quite effectively. It describes newly built all-season asphalt and concrete roads that connected the coastal plain and the interior in Mandatory Palestine. Unlike the old dirt roads that were impassable during winter and raised choking dust in the summer, these new infrastructures supported the expansion of economic sectors like citriculture – allowing oranges to be transported from field to harbor during the winter – and that of beachgoing during the summer. Yet built from heat-absorbing materials, the new roads contributed to the formation of heat sinks and prevented rain absorption. Moreover, they flamed the escalation in heated intercommunal clashed between minimally clothed Jews and Arabs congregating together at the beach.

As the rest of the book shows, such vicious thermo-political cycles play an unrecognized role in the history of the Middle East, a region often labeled a “hotspot” but where heat is seldom considered seriously. For example, I trace the impact of August 1929 heat on the famous riots that some historians argue triggered the conflict over Palestine. One overlooked trigger was tension surrounding fair-skinned Jewish women wearing shorts in ethnically mixed cities like Jaffa – a cooling strategy for some became a provocation for others.

Beyond Palestine, other vicious cycles include the introduction of air conditioning in Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the 1940s. This emblematic vicious cycle relied on fossil-fuel electricity for cooling while enabling oil extraction in hot regions as American oilmen in Arabia depended on their ACs. In turn, combusted oil released greenhouse gases, intensifying global warming and local heating.

The advent of mechanical cooling accelerated the shift in attitudes towards perspiration, the body's natural cooling mechanism. Heat, A History chronicles the transformation of sweat from a desirable, even erotic substance in early modern times to an abject fluid to be suppressed or masked. This shift paralleled and intertwined with the increasing reliance on fossil-fueled cooling technologies. The book posits that breaking our dependence on fossil-fueled technology requires a multi-level reconsideration of our attitudes towards heat and cooling. This reassessment must span from the individual body to the built environment and ultimately to the global scale. By recognizing how our perceptions of sweat and heat have changed over time, as well as the social and political dispositions involved, we can begin to challenge our current reliance on energy-intensive cooling methods.

Visit On Barak's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hatim Rahman's "Inside the Invisible Cage"

Hatim Rahman is an award-winning associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, and reported the following:

From page 99:

TalentFinder also retained the sole right to remove any feedback it deemed as hurting its interests:

In order to protect the integrity of the feedback system and protect Users from abuse, TalentFinder reserves the right (but is under no obligation) to remove posted feedback or information that, in TalentFinder’s sole judgment, violates the Terms of Service or negatively affects our marketplace, diminishes the integrity of the feedback system or otherwise is inconsistent with the business interests of TalentFinder.

According to this statement, TalentFinder was able to simultaneously absolve itself of the responsibility of investigating the accuracy of feedback scores while also monitoring these scores to the point that it could remove any feedback that it felt hurt its business interests. As is common with terms of services, TalentFinder’s polices allowed the platform to “have its cake and eat it too,” especially in regard to asserting control over the rating system.

None of the people I interviewed indicated that they had read any of these agreements, let alone expressed objections to them. Many scholars have commented that online contracts have been designed and implemented in such a way that users are simply conditioned to agree to terms without deliberating or reading the contract. Legal scholar Margaret Radin notes that, broadly speaking, people are subject to two different types of contractual agreements. In “agreement” contracts, either party can negotiate the terms before an agreement is reached and the contract is finalized. Think about negotiating the cost of a used car, the terms when buying a house, or even the price of a product at a flea market. These are variations of agreement contracts because such contracts are not set in stone before the contract is signed or verbally agreed to.

On the other hand, “boilerplate” contracts are standardized take-it-or-leave-it contracts that, in practice, are impossible to

Page 99 of my book, Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, provides background knowledge about the book’s main argument. That is, the book’s main argument is that organizations, particularly digital platforms, are using algorithms to control high-skilled workers within an “invisible cage”: an environment in which organizations embed the rules and guidelines for how workers should behave in opaque algorithms. It is ‘invisible’ because organizations can use algorithms to change the rules and criteria for success at an unprecedented speed and scale without notice, explanation, or recourse. It is a ‘cage’ because these algorithms increasingly control our opportunities without our say.

Page 99 discusses one important mechanism that enables organizations to create an invisible cage. This page shows an example of how the organization I studied uses its terms of service to accrue power over workers, and enabled the organization to make changes to the platform. Specifically, this page illustrates how the organization established the right to control information and visibility of a workers’ feedback on the platform without workers’ consent or awareness. The power to make such changes is critical because workers rely on their rating feedback to attract new clients and secure additional work. Importantly, by embedding the provision mentioned on page 99 in the terms of service, TalentFinder is creating a “digital boilerplate agreement.” The beginning of the chapter argues that these agreements are shifting terms of service that enable an organization to implement any change that further entrenches its power and information asymmetries over workers. Page 99 is indeed an important page but it does not exactly reveal the quality of the whole book, which begins by laying out the history of online labor markets and ratings, then sharing the stories of real workers on the labor market, and finally discussing the construct of the invisible cage and its ramifications on theory and practice.

The reason I think the Page 99 Test does not, overall, provide an accurate understanding of my book’s quality is because many sections of the book provide greater depth to the book’s core thesis. Without knowing the thesis, which is laid out in the beginning of the book, page 99 does not provide the best illustration of the book’s quality.

Learn more about Inside the Invisible Cage at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica L. Gaston's "Illusions of Control"

Erica L. Gaston is senior policy advisor and head of the Conflict Prevention and Sustaining Peace Programme at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a nonresident fellow at both the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Global Public Policy Institute.

Gaston applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses why the so-called “bargaining environment” in Afghanistan in 2009 was much more diverse, multi-player, and complex than in 2005 in Iraq, when U.S. military leaders in Iraq had much closer to a monopoly on military and political decision-making regarding U.S. initiatives. This page would give a flavor for the type of analysis and subject matter as a whole: it touches on two of the three main arenas for the book (Afghanistan and Iraq in periods of U.S. intervention) and also deals with the idea of bargaining debates influencing policy outcomes, which is one of the central theoretical premises. However, because page 99 offers evidence relevant to understanding only two of nine case studies, and related to a minor theoretical sub-contention, it would not necessarily give a sense of the main themes, features, or overall argument of the book. The larger focus of the book is on how a series of tactical or technical measures adopted by the United States to mitigate risks associated with irregular forces (militias, rebels and other local armed groups) often contributed to these initiatives being authorized or approved, but ultimately did little to address the risks in question. This introduced a degree of moral hazard, potentially leading the US to engage in riskier partnerships than it might have. At a theoretical level, the book tests the most common academic paradigm applied to these proxy relationships, which is principal-agent theory, against the evidence. While principal-agent theory well describes the risks involved when the US tried to delegate security and other policy tasks to these irregular forces, it does not do a good job of explaining why the US imposed such a range of checks and controls, even as they proved increasingly costly and ineffective. Instead the evidence much more closely aligns with the theoretical expectations of bureaucratic policy analysis (BPA), which finds that policy outcomes are more likely to be influenced by political bargaining and organizational inputs as by top-down cost-benefit analyses or other more strategic calculations. The BPA bargaining lens is even more broadly applicable when expanded to include the much wider range of transnational and non-US government players that tend to be involved in these sorts of hybrid political and security environments. Page 99 fits into this by exploring the nature of the bargaining arena, and how this helps explain why so many more checks were imposed on Afghan local forces (the Afghan Local Police) than on the Iraqi forces mobilized only a few years earlier (the sahwa). It’s an important piece of the puzzle but likely not enough of one for the reader to get a sense of the full book on its own.

Learn more about Illusions of Control at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cormac Ó Gráda's "The Hidden Victims"

Cormac Ó Gráda is an Irish economic historian and professor emeritus at University College Dublin. His many books include Famine: A Short History and Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains part of an account of famine in Moldova, then part of the former Soviet Union, in the wake of World War 2. The first part of the page is a table describing the death rate. The second part contains:

As with all Soviet famines, the underlying causes of the (Moldovan) famine have been disputed. Severe drought in the spring of 1946 in the wake of an occupation that left the economy flattened and twenty million dead is one possibility; official culpability for prioritizing grain exports at the expense of the starving masses is another. In 1946, for the fifth year in a row, grain output in the Soviet Union was less than half its pre-war average. Wiliam P. Forrest believed that in Ukraine it had taken a herculean effort to plant “over 80 percent” of the 1940 harvested area but that the crop yield per acre could not, “at the most optimistic estimate”, have been much more than 40 percent of that of 1940.

If browsers open the book to page 99, would they get a good or a poor idea of the whole work? Yes and No. Page 99 is representative of one important part of a 500-page book, which describes the impact of WW1 and WW2 on civilians in the form of hunger, starvation, and related diseases. It captures the ‘feel’ of the book’s account of the many war-famines that together killed over twenty million civilians. It also reflects the fact that, as the title indicates, civilian deaths are the subject of the book. Page 99 also captures the way the book is written: a mélange of quantification, analysis, and narrative. Famine deaths in the Soviet Union in 1946-7 represented only a small fraction of the sixty million or so deaths of non- combatants during the two wars.

Page 99 also hints at the grim reality that the civilian death toll from both wars continued to mount after 1918 and 1945, respectively. However, it does not capture the fact that the book is about all kinds of civilian casualties. The Hidden Victims also describes and seeks to count civilian casualties by genocide, aerial bombing, and by other means, as well as to document the cost to survivors in terms of forced displacement, trauma, and sexual violence. It also highlights where the likely true figures differ from those most frequently cited, and where the truth will always be difficult to establish. Nor does page 99 contain any of the dozens of black-and-white photographic images employed

Learn more about The Hidden Victims at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosanne Liebermann's "Exile, Incorporated"

Rosanne Liebermann is Associate Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Aarhus University in Denmark. She holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Theology from the University of Oxford.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Exile, Incorporated: The Body in the Book of Ezekiel, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Exile, Incorporated occurs in the middle of Chapter 4 and begins a new section entitled “The Unfaithful Wife, the Unnatural Mother.” The section begins: “While the woman in Ezekiel 16 is made to look the part of Yhwh’s wife, her behaviour once married is not fitting for her new social role. The text begins to list Yhwh’s accusations against her.” There follows a quote from Ezekiel 16:15-19 in my translation. This part of the Old Testament text shows that the woman, who has married the god Yhwh in Ezekiel’s metaphorical story, immediately begins to behave promiscuously. She uses the clothes, jewellery, perfume, and food Yhwh gave her as wedding gifts to make, adorn, and offer to statues of other gods. The text goes on to accuse her of promiscuity with Egyptians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and other foreigners (Ezek 16:25-26, 28-29). Yhwh condemns the woman’s behaviour by saying that she is more sinful than a sex worker. Whereas a sex worker’s activities can be explained by her need for money, Yhwh’s wife pays other men to persuade them to sleep with her.

This page of Exile, Incorporated does not provide an especially good insight into my book. Page 99 is mostly taken up by primary text, the relevance of which for the book’s argument is only unpacked in the following pages. I could imagine that anyone beginning to read the book at this page would find it inaccessible and put it back down again!

However, the initial sentence of page 99 does reflect one of the book’s core premises: that identity is something constantly created and maintained via the practices and experiences of the body. Being ascribed a certain identity, whether at birth or later on, is not enough to maintain that identity unquestionably throughout life. In the case of the metaphor in Ezekiel 16 featured on page 99, a woman becomes a high-status wife through her marriage to a deity, but she loses that status via her sexual promiscuity. My book goes on to discuss how the woman also fails to act as any normal kind of mother, since she slaughters her own children. In Ezekiel’s metaphor, the woman represents Jerusalem, and her promiscuity and child sacrifice represent the people’s worship of gods other than Yhwh and forming of alliances with foreign nations. Ezekiel seeks to demonstrate that, just as a woman loses her identity as a wife because of her unfaithfulness, Jerusalem loses its identity as Yhwh’s special city due to its disloyalty.

This is all part of the main argument of Exile, Incorporated: that the book of Ezekiel seeks to portray the Judeans who went into exile to Babylonia in the sixth century BCE as the continuation of Yhwh’s people. By undermining Jerusalem and the Judeans who remained there, Ezekiel can demonstrate that it is the Judeans in Babylonia who are the true people of Yhwh. But these exiled Judeans cannot rely on their special group identity, either. According to the book of Ezekiel, they must continually enact this identity via their bodies; for example, by conducting circumcision, observing Sabbaths and feast days, and leaving ritual activities up to the priesthood. Ezekiel’s metaphor about the unfaithful wife also acts as a cautionary tale regarding sexual liaisons with foreigners. In these ways, I argue that the book of Ezekiel advocates that the Judeans in Babylonia “incorporate” their specifically exilic Judean identity into their everyday behaviours and experiences.

Learn more about Exile, Incorporated at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott K. Taylor's "Ambivalent Pleasures"

Scott K. Taylor is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain.

Taylor applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ambivalent Pleasures: Soft Drugs and Embodied Anxiety in Early Modern Europe, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ambivalent Conquests does a good job of portraying how this book tries to uncover the deep patterns in the past that set the stage for drug use today. In particular, it shows early modern Europeans wrestling with the soft drugs that were either new to them at the time or newly available in mass quantities – sugar, chocolate, coffee, tea, distilled spirits like rum and gin, opium, and on this page, tobacco. Here readers will find Europeans trying to figure out why tobacco, like all the other new drugs, were so hard to quit using once started. Early modern Europeans thought they understood the medicinal properties of all these substances quite well – and all these drugs were used initially as medicines – through the old concepts of Galenic humoral medicine that dated back to ancient Greece. But nothing in their medical heritage helped them understand what we today would call “addiction” or “substance use disorder.” On this page, we find observers from England, France, and Spain wondering if something in the drugs themselves gave them power over their users, and they employed the language of sorcery and slavery to articulate this idea. Other attempts to understand addiction drew on their understanding of gluttony, an individual vice, or on problems that inhered in society as a whole, like luxury and debauchery. Probing the ways that Europeans first tried to grapple with the compulsive use of psychotropic drugs might help us see a way forward when the “brain disease” model of substance abuse is beginning to crumble today.

Learn more about Ambivalent Pleasures at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances Yaping Wang's "The Art of State Persuasion"

Frances Yaping Wang is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. She received her PhD in politics from the University of Virginia. She was previously an assistant professor at the Singapore Management University, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame's International Security Center, a Minerva-United State Institute of Peace (USIP) Peace Scholar, a predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies of the George Washington University, and an editor/analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Wang applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Art of State Persuasion: China's Strategic Use of Media in Interstate Disputes, and reported the following:

Page 99 delves into China’s hardline foreign policy through a detailed case study of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war. Drawing on archival sources and historical data, it provides a concise overview of China’s internal decision-making process leading up to the conflict.

While this page offers a rich, granular analysis of a significant historical event, it is perhaps too specific to serve as an introduction to the broader themes of the book. In fact, any page from the introduction would better capture the book’s overarching ideas than page 99. Page 99 is just one part of a larger theoretical framework, which is illustrated through four distinct case studies. These case studies, each representing different scenarios, are integral to the book’s argument. The 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war is the only historical case among them, distinguished by its rich historical context and its exploration of one of the most extensive propaganda campaigns in Chinese history—a campaign that spanned a decade and remains one of the most remarkable feats of the Chinese propaganda machinery.

While page 99 effectively showcases the meticulous use of evidence, including quotes from recently declassified documents, it is but a small window into the book’s broader narrative. Beyond this historical case, the book also employs advanced computerized text analysis to compare various types of propaganda campaigns, drawing insightful comparisons between Chinese propaganda and that of other authoritarian regimes. In sum, while page 99 provides a fascinating and detailed glimpse into a crucial historical case, capturing the depth of analysis and the rigorous use of evidence, it offers only a narrow perspective on the book’s wider argument. For those looking to grasp the full scope and intent of the book, the introduction would provide a far better entry point.

Visit Frances Yaping Wang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue