Maron E. Greenleaf's "Forest Lost"

Maron E. Greenleaf is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Forest Lost is about how a government program in the Amazon tried to make the living rainforest monetarily valuable in order to protect it. The program is a prominent example of widespread efforts to combat climate change using market mechanisms, like carbon offsets or credits. Forests keep a significant amount of carbon in trees, plants, and soils, a lot of which goes into the atmosphere if they are burned or degraded. This includes the Amazon rainforest (the world’s largest), which is hugely important for climate change, biodiversity, and the lives and livelihoods of the people who live there. It’s also being destroyed at an alarming rate, in part because it’s worth more dead than alive. The Acrean government tried to change that by making the living forest and its carbon monetarily valuable.

Page 99 is part of my explication of a key part of that effort: to make “forest carbon into a source of public wealth whose value it [the state government] could redistribute as benefits” to poor rural people. On this page, I explore two ways that this approach differed from the private property-focus of many other forest carbon offset projects. First, that it “decoupled forest carbon’s value” from land and its ownership—a thorny issue in a region where formal land rights are often unclear. Second, how the program moved forest carbon’s value from land—where it could more easily be captured by wealthy large landholders—to labor. This included labor undertaken by poor rural people that the government deemed to protect the forest. The people could then be characterized as “providers of ecosystem services” eligible to receive government benefits.

Reading page 99 offers a glimpse of a key component of Forest Lost’s analysis: that the Amazonian program’s effort to make the living forest valuable differed significantly from many characterizations of carbon offsets and other iterations of what I call “green capitalism.” Page 99 focuses on an important example of this: the sidestepping of private property and the valorization of labor. However, the page (being only a page) doesn’t give the full picture. It doesn’t reveal how the shift from land to labor was key to the development of an environmentally-premised welfare state—the opposite of what apparently neoliberal, green capitalist schemes (like carbon offsets) are supposed to produce. This analysis, in turn, is part of the book’s larger story about how green capitalist efforts to address climate change rely on and remake the relations of everyday life in one of the world’s most climatically essential landscapes.

Visit Maron E. Greenleaf's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joe Street's "Black Revolutionaries"

Joe Street is associate professor of American history at Northumbria University. He has been researching, teaching, and writing on the Black Panther Party for over a decade, publishing a series of articles in the Journal of American Studies, the Pacific Historical Review, and the European Journal of American Studies. He has also written extensively on the relationship between politics and popular culture in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1960s, including the books Silicon Valley Cinema and Dirty Harry’s America.

Street applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Black Revolutionaries summarises chapter five, which evaluates the experience of rank-and-file members of the BPP across the nation. Acting as a bridge to the book’s next section, the page reveals the level of police and FBI disruption BPP activists in numerous chapters endured. It ends by arguing that understanding local activism helps us fully comprehend BPP praxis. Here, the book reminds readers that grassroots activism and BPP theory (as defined by leaders like Huey P. Newton) informed each other. This, the page – and the book as a whole – argues, helps us understand the BPP’s critique of American capitalism.

I think – I hope! – that readers of page 99 might be intrigued enough to read the rest of Black Revolutionaries. It focuses on one of the book’s key assertions, namely the importance of grassroots activism to the BPP, and hints at the book’s other overarching arguments. These revolve around the importance of Marxist thought and anti-capitalist action to the BPP and the baleful impact of the concerted FBI and police campaign to destroy the Party and its members. Within this, the test might lead browsers to conclude that the book overwhelmingly focuses on the rank-and-file. Sadly, I’m not a skilful enough historian to write that book! Instead, I tried to unite the grassroots experience with evaluation of the intellectual and activist experience of key figures in the BPP such as Newton, Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver, and Fred Hampton. Praxis, as I suggest above, is crucial here, since the book argues that BPP thought and activism informed each other in synergy. Through the book I attempt to address a key issue often overlooked by historians and observers of the organization, which is the BPP’s relationship with Marxism. The discussion that ends page 99 revolves around this issue, and perhaps contains enough provocations to entice browsers to turn the page and see where my argument goes next.

Consequently, if I had to offer a grade to the test, I’d suggest a ‘B.’ I’m hopeful that page 99 prompts browsers to request Black Revolutionaries from their local library, or maybe even dip into their pocket and buy a copy!

Learn more about Black Revolutionaries at the University of Georgia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Jacobson's "Intoxicating Pleasures"

Lisa Jacobson is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition, and reported the following:

Page 99 gives readers a good sense of the varied ways alcoholic beverage producers attempted to destigmatize alcohol and enhance the industry’s public image after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. It analyzes the advertising and public relations campaign that Edward Bernays, a pioneering public relations authority, developed in the late 1930s for the United Brewers’ Industrial Foundation (UBIF), a brewing industry trade association. Designed to appeal to housewives and rural voters—the two groups most likely to support alcohol bans in local option elections—the campaign promoted

beer as a food and a source of culinary adventure, partly with the goal of getting housewives to view beer as many brewers did: not as an intoxicating beverage but as a ‘liquid food’ that belonged in the pantry ‘alongside the bread and other foodstuffs.’…

The brewers’ revival of the liquid food argument was both surprising and risky. Not only had the argument failed to gain traction during the crusade for national Prohibition, but it likely only further antagonized brewers’ opponents. Consider the trade card advertisement that one Detroit brewer created in 1883 to advance the anti-prohibitionist cause. The color lithograph featured a cherubic toddler seated in a high chair, with a beer mug in hand, and the accompanying jingle left little doubt about the source of the babe’s cheerful disposition: ‘the youngster ruddy with good cheer, serenely sips his Lager Beer’ (see Figure 5).…

Despite obvious political risks, the UBIF campaign loudly trumpeted the liquid food metaphor.

UBIF advertisements touted beer as “Nature’s Liquid Food” and celebrated the farmers who supplied grains for consumers’ bread and beer. Bernays hired home economists to write recipe booklets that used beer to flavor both savory dishes (beer bread, beer-based cheese sauces) and sweet dishes (chocolate beer cake, sweet potatoes baked in beer). By leaning into beer cookery and the liquid food metaphor, the UBIF campaign, I argue, aimed to “[anchor] beer more firmly to the food side of the food-drug divide.” The strategy had “distinct political upsides: it kept beer taxes low and allowed beer to be sold in delis and grocery stores,” where sales of wine and spirits were prohibited.

Page 99 offers a surprisingly good preview of several themes in the book. First, the creation of the UBIF campaign, motivated in part by the resurgence of prohibitionist sentiment among women and rural voters, underscores the continued vulnerability of the alcoholic beverage industry after Prohibition. Second, page 99 reveals how the alcoholic beverage industry pinned its hopes for rehabilitation on winning women to their side. Public relations experts, marketing authorities, and trade associations all recognized that women had enormous control over the industry’s fortunes both as voters who could sway the outcome in local option elections and as the gatekeepers who decided how much and what kind of alcohol entered the home. The UBIF courted women’s consumer and political loyalty by hiring other women —home economists, cookbook authors—to demonstrate how beer could be safely integrated into the home as a beverage and as a cooking aid. By emphasizing beer’s place in the American home, the UBIF campaign also aimed to distance beer from the disrepute of the saloon—a strategy that brewers deployed with even greater sophistication during World War II. Finally, page 99 introduces the idea that alcohol producers attempted transform previously illicit substances into ordinary pleasures by placing intoxicants on the same moral plane as food. For centuries many cultures had viewed beer and wine as foods rather than drugs, but this trend began to reverse itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the mass production and distribution of spirits increased the prevalence of drunkenness and crime. Societies with strong temperance movements exiled spirits—along with beer and wine—from the category of food and reclassified them as drugs that merited strict regulation. In other chapters, readers will learn how the 1939 world’s fairs and food crusades launched during World War II created new opportunities for brewers, vintners, and distillers to narrow the food-drug divide. Clever readers of page 99 may intuit that wine, beer, and whiskey followed parallel and divergent paths in their quest for respectability and regulatory favor.

Learn more about Intoxicating Pleasures at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennie Lightweis-Goff's "Captive City"

Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a scholar, lyric essayist, and, most essentially, a New Orleans flâneur. She is the author of two scholarly books, Blood at the Root and Captive City. Her essays have appeared in the major journals of U.S. literature, including Signs, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, minnesota review, and south. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Liberties, and at her Substack, The Butcher's Darling, where she writes on grief, precarious labor, sobriety, and intellectual work that was "born in the back of the house."

Lightweis-Goff applied the “Page 99 Test” to Captive City and reported the following:

Ten years ago, I reached for a volume on the top shelf among the Fs in Dewey’s Decimal Classification System. It was a quiet day at Tulane, where I worked as the ACLS New Faculty Fellow. Despite my comparatively young age, I am a Luddite! There are not enough random buttons on the internet. But there are plenty on paper; page 99 in Captive City is one of them.

When people remember the great poets of the 1920s, they think of Eliot, Hughes, Stevens, Cullen, and Moore. Our grandparents’ generation thought of Stephen Vincent Benet. You might find 8 copies of Benet’s John Brown’s Body (1928) in the Ps of some library or its offsite depository. Intellectuals and middlebrow readers alike love pretending that we do not know who Colleen Hoover or E.L. James are, and so we often forget the long-dead “thought-leaders.” I let Dewey guide me to them.

Page 99 of Captive City won’t take you to Benet. Rather, it introduces you to Abraham Oakey Hall, who I met in the F shelves. There, I found a reprint of his book The Manhattaner in New Orleans (1851), published by the Louisiana Bicentennial Commission in 1976 as one of the signal books for understanding the city. Recent travelers see the city as a wax museum of the past, or a hipster laboratory of the future. Hall, rather, saw it as an investment opportunity. Page 99 reminds you that “cultural and economic powers converge…..Culture is a resource to be exploited: a vein of myth, money, and materiel worth mining.”

Hall was a Northern Democrat, a Lincoln antagonist, and the eventual Mayor of New York City (1869 – 1972). Cartoonist Thomas Nast liked to show him as a shaking “mare” between the legs of Tammany Hall Boss William Magear Tweed. Captive City shows him as a more malicious figure….but a compelling one. I cannot be sure which Hall would prefer, but I’m confident that page 99 shows you how my book meanders in the archive of the past. A bad reviewer of the manuscript said I had mistaken myself for Christopher Columbus, but that was closer to a non-reading than a misreading. When it troubles me, I pretend they meant my sense of direction. I’ll have some idea of where I’m going once I get there.

Follow Jennie Lightweis-Goff on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vicente Valentim's "The Normalization of the Radical Right"

Vicente Valentim (PhD European University Institute, 2021) is a political scientist working on comparative politics, political behavior, and political culture. He explores how democracies generate norms against behavior associated with authoritarianism, how those norms are sustained, and how they erode. He also has a keen interest in political methodology, especially causal inference methods. His work has been published in journals including Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies.

Valentim applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Normalization of the Radical Right is a half-page that closes Chapter 4. This chapter discusses the difficulties of measuring some of the key concepts in the book—like social norms and preference falsification—and proposes a measure with which to do so. This, called reported vote, consists of comparing the official vote share for a given party that is declared in post-electoral surveys. The rationale is that voting is private and, as such, it should not be very affected by perceptions of what is acceptable. However, admitting one’s vote is a social interaction, and thus likely to be affected by perceptions of what others think is desirable and acceptable. The implication is that, if a given political party is stigmatized, there will be individuals who vote for it but do not admit having done so—resulting in the party being under-reported in post-electoral surveys.

In this specific page, I discuss how a similar approach can be used in future work, and then circle back to the main argument of the book:

This approach can be followed in subsequent studies interested in studying normative influences. If they are interested in political stigma per se, they can use reported vote as a measure of it. If they are interested in other outcomes, they can use the broader approach discussed in the previous section to apply this logic to other behaviors of interest.

The goal of this chapter has been to discuss reported vote and its underlying logic, since it is crucial to many analyses throughout the book. In the following chapters, I return to the theory of normalization discussed in Chapter 3. Using the approaches discussed in this chapter, I now test observable implications of that theory empirically.

Given that this only a half page and that it is part of the chapter dealing with measurement, readers skipping to page 99 would unfortunately miss much of the core argument of the book. Such argument is twofold: first, more generally, that social norms are a crucial driver of political behavior; second, more specifically, that social norms are central to understand one of the main important political developments of recent years: the rise of radical-right parties and politicians.

I hope this blog post makes readers curious to look into this and other sections of the book!

Visit Vicente Valentim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Highmore's "Playgrounds"

Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (2017) and Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain (2023).

Highmore applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Playgrounds: The Experimental Years, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Playgrounds, the experimental years falls roughly into two halves. The bottom half of the page consists of a photograph of a playground on London’s South Bank, which was included in the film Come Out to Play, from 1954, which accompanied an exhibition and a symposium on Children’s Playgrounds. This playground was built for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and has that mid-century modern feel to it. The photograph shows the playground from above. It consists of a model of a large concrete ship, with a set of funnels. The main part of the ship is filled with sand and about 10 children are playing in it. Nearby are a set of swings, some concrete cubes for clambering over, and a roundabout set on a raised area. In the middle there is a small cluster of mothers and a pram. The top half of the page introduces the playground exhibition and explains that it divided playgrounds into 5 types. The first type was ‘the equipped playground’. Today this might be referred to as a ‘static playground’ or conventional playground and is probably the playground that most usually springs to mind: a flat area of asphalt or concrete (or more recently, spongy rubber) with a selection of fixed devices (swings, slides, and so on). The second type was the ‘unequipped playground’, which as the name suggests was just the flat space and was usually used for playing ball games. The third type was the ‘natural playground’, which the exhibition catalogue describes as a ‘romping ground with undulation, banks, trees, bushes and other natural features’ – basically a section of a park. The fourth type mentioned is the ‘adventure playground’ which had a prominent place in the exhibition and in the debates surrounding it. The catalogue describes the adventure playground as a place where ‘destruction and vandalism are transmuted into creative effort’. Lastly, and least remembered, was the ‘traffic playground’: a miniature road system that children navigated on bikes and in peddle cars.

Page 99 gives the reader a good flavour of the book in terms of the prominence of images throughout the volume. But in other ways it isn’t particularly representative. The book primarily tells the story of the rise of the adventure playground and associated types of play spaces (junk playgrounds, city farms, and the like). These are playgrounds that could be seen as having a social mission. I tell the story of how a playground movement emerged in the late nineteenth century and was then revived in the immediate postwar years, as a ‘child saving’ movement. While the conventional, static playground was simply about physical play and ‘letting off steam’, the adventure playground movement saw itself as creating a safe, creative space, away from adult rules about obedience and authority. It was going to be a space where the young could develop on their own terms.

Page 99 comes at a pivotal moment in the unfolding story of experimental playgrounds. It comes at the start of a chapter titled ‘Busy Roads and High-Rise Living’, which provides the social context for understanding adventure playgrounds and the arguments that were unfolding around them. The adventure playground was a response to a set of forces that was increasingly turning inner cities into hostile environments for children and young people. The exponential rise in traffic posed a daily threat to the lives of children who had been used to playing in the street; more and more working-class children were living in tower blocks without much provision for play; and children wandering around the city on their own were being perceived by the police as potential juvenile delinquents. My book sidelines the school playground and the conventional swings and slides playground, to look intensely at the past, the present, and the future of these inspiring experimental playgrounds.

Learn more about Playgrounds at the Reaktion Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie M. Lane's "More Than Pretty Boxes"

Carrie M. Lane is Chair and Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where she teaches about work, gender, community, ethnography, and disability. She earned a BA in cultural anthropology with a concentration in women’s studies at Princeton University and a PhD in American Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on how work is changing in the Unites States, and what that means for individual workers as well as their families, communities, and country.

Lane applied the “Page 99 Test” to her newest book, More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working, and reported the following:

From page 99:

… to convince her that was not the life for her. Thus, while she knew that whatever freedom she’d gain would need to be secured firmly within air quotes, at some core level, she still knew it felt freer, at least to her.

In the two years since she started organizing full-time, Maggie’s time working with corporate clients has only confirmed her impres­sion of standard employment. “I do really like variety,” she said. “When I go in and work at [corporate client offices] and I see these people, I do not envy them at all going to the same place every day and having a boss. I think that might be something I also don’t want—a boss. They just all seem really miserable.” When organizing work is slow and finances are tight, “there are moments when having that stability seems really, really great.” In those down times, she takes on as many side jobs as she can find, and she’s grateful for her partner’s steadier income, but she’s uncomfortable not always being able to pay her full share of expenses. She’s even talked with her partner, she told me, “about how I should just apply for a full-time job and let all this craziness just go away and just go to one place every day.” And yet, ten years have passed since Maggie and I first spoke, and she still hasn’t opted to return to full-time employment.

For Maggie, a brief taste of full-time work and occasional forays into corporate environments were all it took to compel her to start her own business. For others, the decision to leave full-time employment took much longer and, when it came, was not entirely voluntary.

At fifty-three, organizer Lara had spent most of her adult life working for someone else. Originally from the East Coast, she moved to California in the 1970s to attend college but dropped out to work full-time as a receptionist at a large financial services company. Her attention to detail and straightforward manner earned her a quick promotion to secretary, then personal assistant. She started attending night school and, upon earning her associate’s degree, was promoted to office manager, a position she held for nearly twenty years. In 2010, she was laid off without warning due to budget cuts. Lara’s husband also worked, but she’d always earned the bigger income. “Not working,” she told me, “was not an option. I had to get to work.” But after three decades of working for someone else, she was dreading the…

Page 99 gives the reader a decent sense of the argument of Part One of the book, namely that organizers pursue this career as an alternative to standard employment, one that offers variety, flexibility, and (though this part isn’t on page 99) an opportunity to do meaningful work that helps people. What page 99 misses is the gist of the book’s second half, that through their work with clients, organizers help people manage the feelings of overwork, overwhelm, and self-blame that come from having too much to do and too little time in which to do it.

Happily, page 99 effectively conveys the book’s focus on real people talking about the work they do and why they do it. Other pages might highlight scholarly arguments about the cultural and historical significance of organizing’s rise, but the book’s heart lies squarely in the words and perspectives of organizers themselves. My hope is that any reader could pick up this book and resonate with the stories in its pages, stories of people looking for meaningful work, organizers offering empathy and connection to their clients, and clients—especially women—seeking help managing the overwhelming too-muchness of contemporary life.

I’d have loved for page 99 to have landed on one of the “organizing stories” I sandwich between the book’s chapters, which offer glimpses into the real-life organizing jobs I assisted on for my research. There, in the stories of sorting through mugs and storage units and memorabilia, readers can see for themselves how complicated, intimate, and emotional the organizing process can be.

Visit Carrie M. Lane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Fuhrmann's "Influence without Arms"

Matthew Fuhrmann is the Cullen-McFadden Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Yale University (2023-24), Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University (2016-17), Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (2010-11), and Research Fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (2007-08). He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2016 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

His research and teaching focus on international security issues with an emphasis on nuclear weapons, diplomacy and bargaining, and alliance politics. He is the author of three books, including Influence Without Arms: The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence (2024) and Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (2017, with Todd S. Sechser). His articles are published in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Security, and International Studies Quarterly.

Fuhrmann applied the “Page 99 Test” to Influence without Arms and reported the following:

Page 99 offers a technical primer on how to make nuclear weapons. It describes different kind of bomb designs, including the Fat Man implosion-type bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. The page goes to discuss other technological challenges in making more sophisticated weapons. This includes miniaturizing warheads so that they can be mated to a long-range missile. The goal of this discussion is to generate a timeline – how long would it take for a country with a large nuclear energy program, such as Japan, to build a nuclear weapon following a political decision?

Influence Without Arms offers a mixed bag for the Page 99 test. This page gives readers a good sense of a key subject in the book: the technology needed to make a nuclear weapon. But it doesn’t get at the core questions examined in the book, nor does it lay out any of the main arguments or evidence. Page 99 might give one the sense that this book is primarily technical in nature, perhaps like a “how to” manual for making a bomb. But it is primarily about international politics.

The book is about a group of countries that have been overlooked by scholars and policymakers: those that have the technology needed to make a nuclear bomb but choose to stay nonnuclear. These countries, including Brazil, Japan, and (for now) Iran, have what is known as “nuclear latency.” Influence Without Arms develops the concept of latent nuclear deterrence – the use of a non-weaponized nuclear program to gain greater international influence. It provides new quantitative and qualitative evidence that latent nuclear deterrence can work. Being almost-nuclear leads to a reduction in international crises, better foreign policy relations with adversaries, a lower risk of their adversaries arming with nuclear weapons, and stronger defense commitments for U.S. allies. However, latent nuclear deterrence can be a risky strategy. Countries attempting it can also invite military conflict and arms races, especially if others believe that the latent power is racing to build a bomb.

The book has implications for big policy questions facing leaders in Washington and around the globe. What are the prospects for future nuclear proliferation? Will countries like Iran and South Korea seek nuclear weapons in the coming months and years? Would the world be safer and more peaceful without nuclear weapons? What would peace and stability look like in a world with many latent nuclear powers but no assembled weapons? The book provides answers, teaching us how nuclear latency can enrich our understanding of international politics.

Visit Matthew Fuhrmann's website.

The Page 99 Test: Atomic Assistance.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Chappel's "Golden Years"

James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. The author of Catholic Modern, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic.

Chappel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book is about the birth of “retirement communities” after World War II. It describes especially those neighborhoods that were known as ARCs, or “age-restricted communities.” These came into being for the first time in this era. It also describes other forms of congregate living for senior citizens that sprang up in the 1960s, including some sponsored by the federal government. Lastly, it describes some research, undertaken then and since, that indicates that age restriction of this sort has many benefits for older people.

This is a fun page, I think! It definitely brings the reader into the mind-set of the book as a whole. After all, the main questions of the book are: why did America decide that “older people” are a class apart, and how has that changed over time, and what have been the costs and benefits of such a decision? The book talks a great deal about social policy and popular culture—those are probably the two main throughlines of the book. But another thread concerns housing, which after all is one of the most important issues facing older people, and younger ones, today.

The issue of housing does not have a chapter of its own, but it crops up in every single chapter. Basically, the early parts of the book, about the early twentieth century, show how older people used to live, primarily, with family members. The middle parts of the book, from which page 99 are drawn, show how senior citizens participated in the vogue for independent, single-family homes after World War II. Now, they parritipated somewhat uncomfortably in this vogue, because an older couple without resident children is not really a “single family,” as the term is usually understood. Other forms of senior housing therefore developed, of which the ARCs and retirement communities were one. The last part of the book shows the crisis that has been wrought by that drive for independent housing, which creates crises in the care economy and also in the housing market. It describes new experiments in assisted living facilities, and the return of intergenerational living.

Learn more about Golden Years at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ivan Gaskell's “Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds”

Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History at Bard Graduate Center, New York City. His research centers on three fields in philosophy: how humans make and use material items; questions arising from writing history from material items; and the role of museums in the generation of knowledge claims. Recent books are Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History, Art (2019), and (as editor with Sarah Anne Carter), The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (2020).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book plunges the reader into a discussion of “Artistry.” The first paragraph concludes an account of the similarities and differences between Thoreau and his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson regarding the “useful arts.” Thoreau concurs with Emerson that craft skills can be beneficial but fears that “men have become the tools of their tools,” a demeaning state. He concludes that “The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.” In the paragraph that follows, the reader sees how Thoreau imagined what it might be for an artist to free himself through uncompromising devotion to the pursuit of artistic perfection. Thoreau consistently appealed not only to the classical tradition of Greek and Roman letters in which he had been educated, but — most unusually in mid-nineteenth-century America — to orally transmitted Native American knowledge, Chinese Confucian texts, and Hindu scripture. On page 99 the reader will find Thoreau’s presentation of a parable drawn from the Hindu Visnu Purāna. From page 99:

The object of the artist’s pursuit was a perfect wooden staff, and his concentration and determination were such that “time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.” While the artist determinedly sought a suitable stick and eventually fashioned it, his city of Kouroo disappeared, its ruling dynasty died out, and the polestar—which … lasts a day of Brahma, or 4,320,000,000 years—was replaced by a new polestar. On completing the staff, in Thoreau’s words, “it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions.” Thoreau concludes the parable: “The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?” Thoreau’s tale of uncompromising artistic creation toward the end of his scriptural book, Walden, encapsulates an unrealizable ideal of artistry, but it is an artistry that takes a practical item, a wooden staff, as its means of world renewal

Page 99 of Mindprints advances the book’s overarching theme of tracing the role of aesthetics–notably everyday and environmental aesthetics–in Henry David Thoreau’s thought. Like nearly every other page in the book, it includes quotations from Thoreau’s writings: not only from Walden, but, most especially, from his extensive journals, one of the richest documents of observation and reflection in American letters. Appropriately enough, readers may conceive of this exercise–turning to page 99–as an act of divination akin to the Chinese I Ching process of random selection. Indeed, as I discuss later in Mindprints (page 143), the composer John Cage, an admirer of Thoreau, created Lecture on the Weather (1975) for “twelve speaker-vocalists (or -instrumentalists)” by–in Cage’s words–“subjecting Thoreau’s writings to I Ching chance operations to obtain collage texts.” The Page 99 Test works!

Learn more about Mindprints at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue