Catherine Blyth's "The Art of Conversation"

Catherine Blyth is a writer and editor. She has contributed to publications like The Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and Mail on Sunday, and written scripts for the BBC and Channel 5.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Art of Conversation: A Guided Tour of a Neglected Pleasure, and reported the following:

The first question: which edition, British or American?

Anglophiles enter the tail end of chapter four, 'The Rest is Silence'. Yes, an entire, brief chapter celebrates a communication tool 'as versatile as the queen in chess' – able to provoke thought, aid negotiation, and more. This page relishes the confidence silence bestows, before arguing it opens 'a window of opportunity' – either to mend a hole in conversation, or exit.

Meanwhile, Gotham Books' lean volume skips ahead to Five, 'Fit Subjects'. What makes a good topic? With help from Aristotle, I explain why 'topics are unstable mixtures of attitude and subject', whose interest rate (like most people's) declines with time, before offering a menu of topics, rating their virtues, and risks.

Does either 99 faithfully represent my book?

Well, obviously I explore how conversation works, and how anyone can do better. But neither page displays the range of reference (from nomads to kings to waitresses to hostage negotiators), the funny stories, or my argument: that conversation is an everyday luxury that costs nothing, but can bring you the world.

Beyond how to talk to anyone, this art encompasses all our tools for reading and changing minds. How we listen, persuade and flirt; how Dolly Parton entrances interviewers; why we should laugh at our jokes, and how to navigate tricky discussion, at work, in love, and play.

In short, everything we need to survive – and enjoy – tough times.

Listen to an excerpt from The Art of Conversation, and learn more about the book and author at Catherine Blyth's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dalton Conley's "Elsewhere, U.S.A."

Dalton Conley is University Professor of the Social Sciences and Acting Dean for the Social Sciences at New York University. He also teaches at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, as an Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and he as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, and Slate, among other publications. His previous books include Honky; Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America; and The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety, and reported the following:

On page 99 (spilling over from bottom of 98) I discuss how “the purchase” has displaced the gift relationship in today’s economy. In the classic anthropological text, The Gift, Marcel Mauss describes the “potlatch” in which primitive societies would exchange shells or other gifts around in a great big circle before throwing the lot into the sea. The gift promotes social solidarity by binding the recipient to the giver through the responsibility to reciprocate (and to treasure the gift – hang the proverbial picture on the wall when they visit). By contrast, the modern agora – ­or marketplace­ – with monetary exchange relationships for everything (think Craigslist) undermines that social economy by pricing the formerly priceless (despite what the credit card ads claim).

This is but one way that the rapid expansion of markets has changed the texture of social life in recent years. The second way I point to on page 99 is the ubiquity of the “winner’s curse” thanks to the proliferation of auction sites (think eBay and Priceline). The winner’s curse is a term that economists use to describe the fact that the so-called winner of an auction is actually the loser, since s/he paid too much – by definition – given that s/he outbid the wisdom of the market, which sets value & price.

These are two tidbits in a book meant to explain the new texture of social and economic life in today’s Elsewhere Society and how we got there.

Read an excerpt from Elsewhere, U.S.A., and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Visit Dalton Conley's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeff Benedict's "Little Pink House"

Jeff Benedict is an award-winning investigative journalist, a lawyer, and a best-selling author of seven books. He is a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated and the Hartford Courant.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage, and reported the following:

Little Pink House is the behind-the-scenes account of Kelo v. New London, the most controversial Supreme Court case since Roe v. Wade. The story is set in a seaside, blue collar town in Connecticut, where a neighborhood street fight escalated into a high-stakes federal case. But what happened there could happen anywhere. The fight is over private property rights. The City of New London used a development corporation to condemn, seize and demolish homes to make way for a five-star hotel, a spa, office space and upscale housing. All of this is intended to complement plans by Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, to build its global research and development headquarters next door to the neighborhood. But a nurse – Susette Kelo – and her neighbors rally to save their homes from the wrecking ball.

Page 99 of the book has the NLDC (that’s the development company going after the houses) working hand-in-hand with Pfizer and the government to acquire more and more property. And a local newspaper is trying to find out what they’re up to. It’s all part of the build-up to a dramatic confrontation that ultimately plays out on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and on the steps of the Supreme Court. This case makes history and changes the meaning of eminent domain when the court says it is okay to take land from one person and give it to another capable of generating higher taxes.

On one level this is all about government overstepping its bounds and crushing the little guy. “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property,” Justice Sandra Day O’Conner wrote in a blistering dissent. “Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.” Yet beneath this obvious injustice, there’s an even more compelling hidden drama driven by the conflict between unchecked power and raw defiance. At its core this story is about human pride, a virtue that breeds self-respect and a condition that is first among the seven cardinal sins.

Sir Edward Coke said: “A man’s house is his castle …and where shall a man be safe if it be not in his own house?” Little Pink House will make you think twice about this.

Read an excerpt from Little Pink House, and learn more about the book and author at Jeff Benedict's website. View the Little Pink House video.

--Marshal Zeringue

P.W. Singer's "Wired for War"

P.W. Singer is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; at 34 years old, he's the youngest person ever to hold that position. He's written for or appeared on a wide variety of media, from "60 Minutes" to the New York Times. He has worked for the Pentagon and Harvard University, and in his personal capacity, served as the coordinator of the defense policy advisory task force for the Obama campaign. In his previous two books, Singer foretold the rise of private military contractors and the advent of child soldiers - predictions which proved to be all too accurate.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, and reported the following:

Something big is going on in the history of war, and maybe even humanity itself. The US military went into Iraq with just a handful of drones in the air and zero unmanned systems on the ground, none of them armed. Today, there are over 5,300 drones in the US inventory and another roughly 12,000 on the ground, with the latest models armed with a lethal armory of missiles, rockets, and machine guns. And these are just the first generation, the Model T Fords compared to what is already in the prototype stage. For my book Wired for War, I spent the last several years trying to capture this historic moment, as robots begin to move into the fighting of our human wars. The book features stories and anecdotes of everyone from robotic scientists and the science fiction writers who inspire them to 19 year old drone pilots and the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting. The hope wasn’t just to take the reader on a journey to meet this new generation of warriors—both human and machine, but also to explore the fascinating, and sometimes frightening, political, economic, legal and ethical questions that our society had better start facing in how our wars will be fought and who will fight them. In other words, “What happens when science fiction becomes battlefield reality?”

The book is also written in a style that reflects my generation, and is thus a bit of insurgency against the staid, often inaccessible, way that people in my field write on the most important issues of our day. So, with that, I thought it fun to do the “99 Test” in a way that reflects this goal as well. That is, my generation has such short attention spans that when we pick up a book (if we are not downloading it onto our Kindle instead), we wouldn’t just lock in on just one page, but would be more likely flip the pages. So the following 99 Test includes a clip from p. 99, p. 199, and p. 299 of Wired for War. The p. 99 clip is from a section entitled “To Infinity and Beyond: The Power of Exponential Trends.” It’s a bit of a scene-setter for explaining Moore’s Law and the looming technology changes before us (I also loved having a Depeche Mode shout out in a book about war). The second clip from p. 199 is from a section called “Deep Fried Robots” that explores how even our most advanced technologies are not always triumphant in war. Finally, the clip from p. 299 is from a section called “Un-Manslaughter,” which opens with a discussion of a man (Daraz Khan) mistakenly killed in a US military drone strike because he had the unfortunate luck to resemble Bin Laden and goes on to look at some of the legal complications that are starting to arise when you digitize war.

Excerpt, p. 99:

When Moore first wrote on the phenomenon in 1965, a single transistor cost roughly five dollars. By 2005, five dollars bought five million transistors. With lower exponential costs comes greater exponential demand. In 2003, Intel made its one billionth microchip after thirty-five years of continuous production. Only four years later, it had made its next one billion chips. The same changes have happened with the ability to store data. The cost of saving anything from the military’s Predator drone footage of Iraqi insurgents to your old Depeche Mode songs is going down by 50 percent roughly every fifteen months.

Moore’s law explains how and why we have entered a world in which refrigerator magnets that play Christmas jingles have more computing power than the entire NORAD nuclear defense system had in 1965. Exponential change builds upon exponential change and advancements in one field feed advancements in others. And lower prices in one field help feed new development in others. A good example is how advancements in microchips made portable electronics accessible to consumers. As more and more people bought such items as video and then digital cameras, it dropped the cost of equipping robots with the same kind of cameras (their electronic vision systems) by as much as 75 percent. This eliminated the barriers to entry for robots to be used across the marketplace, further dropping costs for robots as a whole, as more people could buy them. Rodney Brooks at iRobot calls this kind of cross- transfer “riding someone else’s exponentials.”

Excerpt, p. 199:

Whether it is Superman and Kryptonite or Wimpy and hamburgers, everything has a weakness. Indeed, even the Death Star, the most powerful weapon ever imagined in science fiction, was taken out by a young insurgent (yes, that’s what Luke Skywalker was) dropping a bomb through a ventilation shaft. The same is true with real technologies of war. As writer and retired army colonel Ralph Peters explains, “The more complex any system becomes, the more inherent vulnerabilities it has. You just need to find one chink in the armor, change one integer in the code.”

Excerpt, p. 299:

The causes of these mistakes are often in great dispute. Sometimes the blame is placed on the humans behind the machines. In a U.S. airstrike in 2001, for example, twelve out of fourteen smart bombs inexplicably missed their target by a wide margin. It turned out the humans who had programmed the weapons’ targeting back at the base had punched in the wrong coordinates. Other times, the data itself is bad. As we know from the case of Daraz Khan, as well as all that Iraqi WMD we found, our intelligence is sometimes flawed and unmanned attacks don’t always get the right person. In 2005, U.S. officials said that on at least two occasions, “The Predator has been used to attack individuals mistakenly thought to be bin Laden.” Garbage in, garbage out.

Learn more about the book and author at P.W. Singer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Kaufman's "The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences"

Jason Kaufman is a sociologist and historian. He is the author of For the Common Good? American Civil Society and the Golden Age of Fraternity and numerous articles on American politics and culture. He is the former John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where he is currently a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences, and reported the following:

In a nutshell, Origins tries to answer a question that I have often mulled over with left-leaning friends: Why can’t the US be more like Canada? Even with a liberal President in the White House and a Conservative Prime Minister in Ottawa, the US is likely to remain a more competitive, litigious, individualistic place than Canada. Origins explores four centuries of North American history in search of answers.

Page 99 itself relates a little known fact about the American revolution: On the brink of the War of Independence, many Americans were just as upset over the King of England’s recent grant of religious freedom to French-Canadians (via the Quebec Act of 1774) as they were over issues relating to colonial political representation, taxation, and so forth.

Anti-Catholicism was a chief cause of the American Revolution!

Page 99 quotes famous patriot Samuel Adams, for example, who says, “I did verily believe, and I do so still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of Popery [i.e. Catholicism] in America, than from the Stamp Acts of any other Acts destructive of civil rights.”

Page 99 also relates how American military strategy in the ensuing War of Independence (mistakenly) revolved around the belief that French-Canadians could be easily convinced to join in this uprising against their English King. When Quebec rebuffed American diplomacy –led by none other than Benjamin Franklin — the American army tried, unsuccessfully, to invade Quebec. (Think Operation Iraqi Freedom.)

Lest you be misled, however, this episode is not mustered in an effort to harp on the Protestant origins of American exceptionalism but to point out the unusual nature of Canada’s founding. By nesting and protecting a pocket of French-Catholics in Anglo-Protestant Canada, the English colonial government laid the groundwork for many of Canada’s contemporary virtues: multi-culturalism; immigrant-friendly people and policies; a long tradition of respecting provincial and local rights; and a government dedicating to mitigating inequality and conflict across and among diverse peoples.

Most democratic countries don’t achieve even half of this. Canada does, I argue, in part because the Quebec Act of 1774 forced all Canadians to at least tacitly respect people from other ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. In contrast, the early American colonial system thrived on conflict, perpetually pitting colony against colony, group against group, and person against person in a winner-take-all system that still flourishes today.

The rest of the book is, I hope, equally as wide-ranging in its observations and conclusions. In particular, it examines how the ‘frontier’ was settled differently in the two countries, and how that impacted their respective economic, political, and civic systems; it also looks at legal culture and conflict-arbitration techniques in both societies over time; and it focuses on how many of the founding visions of each country were undermined over time, for better and worse.

Read an excerpt from The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences, and learn more about the author and his work at Jason Kaufman's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Wiener's "An Empire on Trial"

Martin J. Wiener is Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Rice University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, An Empire on Trial, describes the struggle between Governor Arthur Gordon and Trinidad planters in the 1860s over how the ordinary people of this British colony, formerly enslaved blacks and indentured East Indians, were to be treated. This struggle was repeated later in Trinidad and in many other parts of the British empire. It highlights one of the themes of the book, which is that the empire was not only divided racially, but also divided within the dominant "white" race. British officials, on the one hand, and white settlers, landowners and businessmen on the other, often had very different values and aims; indeed, often two distinct and clashing understandings of what "Britishness" and "the rule of law" meant. These clashing understandings deeply influenced the history of the British empire, more so than historians have as yet appreciated.

In the book I use the criminal justice system - the prosecution of inter-racial killing - as a lens through which to explore, in seven different territories of the empire, how this conflict expressed itself over a specific, and highly inflammatory, issue. This conflict was part of a broader conflict than ran through the modern history of the empire, one which has implications even today: between the liberal values that permeated British life and thought and the facts of racial inequality in Britain's empire.

Read an excerpt from An Empire on Trial, and learn more about the book from the Cambridge University Press website.

Martin Wiener's other publications include the books English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 and Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louise Penny's "A Rule Against Murder"

Louise Penny's first Three Pines mystery, Still Life, won the New Blood Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. In the United States it received the prestigious Anthony and Barry Awards at Bouchercon 2007, as well as the Dilys Award for the book that the members of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association most enjoyed selling. Her second in the series, A Fatal Grace, won the 2007 Agatha Award for Best Novel. And her third, The Cruelest Month, was number one on the hardcover Independent Mystery Booksellers Association bestseller list in March 2008.

Penny applied the “Page 99 Test” to A Rule Against Murder, the fourth novel in the series, and reported the following:

I think Page 99 is very representative of the rest of the book in that A Rule Against Murder is about a family at conflict with itself. That much even they know. What they don’t realize is how much at odds they are with the rest of the world. How out of step. The book really is about perception and reality.

Not everyone makes the boat, she thought. But HMCS Morrow was sinking. Even Clara could see that. It was a steamboat in the age of jets. They were old money in a meritocracy. Alarms were sounding. But even Peter, her lovely and thoughtful husband, clung to the wreckage.

On page 99 the body has just been found and revealed to be one of the family. They’re staying at a remote Quebec Inn, a place both luxurious and isolated. The entire Inn has been taken up by the family. Except for two other guests, Armand and Reine Marie Gamache. The Morrows have no idea he’s the Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sûreté du Quebec, and have been treating his as though he’s a slightly thick family retainer.

They’re about to learn the truth. And all their delusions are about to be stripped away. About Gamache, and about themselves.

Learn more about the book and author at Louise Penny's website and her blog.

The Page 69 Test: Still Life.

My Book, The Movie: A Fatal Grace.

The Page 99 Test: The Cruelest Month.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lorne Tepperman's "Betting Their Lives"

Lorne Tepperman is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and is the author of many important books on sociology in Canada.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Betting Their Lives: The Close Relations of Problem Gamblers, and reported the following:

Someone opening my book Betting Their Lives to page 99 would, at first, be puzzled: for this page contains short quotes from Latin American immigrants to Canada. Though puzzling at first, these quotes make an important point that is key to understanding the entire book.

Betting Their Lives is about the reasons people become gambling addicts, compulsive gamblers, or “problem gamblers,” and the ways this gambling addiction affects their family life -- especially, their marriage. It also addresses the role a spouse can play in helping an addict overcome this addiction. It approaches this issue from a sociological standpoint, which is unlike the psychological approach taken by most researchers and therapists. This means the book focuses on the social learning of gambling. It is concerned with the “normality” of gambling, even excessive gambling, and the social determinants of this social problem. So, the book focuses on the family experiences of problem gamblers, as children and as adults. And it focuses on the ways different cultures, communities, and families encourage or discourage gambling.

This it does, in part, by listening to the voices of gamblers from a variety of ethno-cultural backgrounds – Anglos, Hispanics Chinese, Russian, West Indian, and Aboriginal. The data show that members of different ethnocultural communities run different risks of gambling addiction. In turn, this points to important group differences in beliefs about gambling, opportunities to gamble, and incentives to gamble (such as poverty). And, if the causes of gambling addiction are largely social and cultural, then we must make a collective, societal effort to deal with the problem. We cannot leave it to individuals to “get treatment” if they have a gambling problem. Problem gambling is a public health problem, needing a political solution.

In the long-term we need to regulate the gambling industry, including the ways gambling is advertised; we need to re-think the role of government in gambling (i.e., should governments rely on gambling for revenue, as they do increasingly today?); and we need to be more cautious about creating gambling inducements for particularly vulnerable populations (e.g., the young and the old, the housebound, and the impoverished). Meanwhile, we need to help spouses enter the “secret worlds” of problem gamblers, from which they are typically excluded. If the long-term solution is through legislation, the short-term solution is through new marital relationships.

Read more about Betting Their Lives at the Oxford University Press website.

Learn more about Lorne Tepperman's teaching, research and publications.

--Marshal Zeringue

D. Sperling and D. Gordon's "Two Billion Cars"

Daniel Sperling is Professor of Engineering and Environmental Science & Policy at the University of California, Davis, and Founding Director of University of California, Davis's Institute of Transportation Studies. Deborah Gordon is a senior transportation policy analyst who has provided consulting services to the National Commission on Energy Policy, the California Energy Commission, Hewlett Foundation, and the Chinese government to develop fiscal policies for their burgeoning auto fleet.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability, and reported the following:

Over and over, the public interest has been overwhelmed by regional and special interests. This recurring theme is conveyed on Page 99 and elsewhere in Two Billion Cars. When it comes to cars, Detroit’s automakers and their billions in bail out funds amply prove this point. And when it comes to the fuel to power them, corn ethanol is a case where special interests have begotten bad energy policy. On Page 99 readers find out why, when made the American way from corn, ethanol is a clear example of all that’s wrong with U.S. transportation, energy, and climate policy.

Despite its energy, economic, and environmental shortcomings, corn ethanol is the current fuel du jour ordered up by policymakers. Corn ethanol has long been the recipient of massive public subsidies amounting to $10 billion in 2008. Midwest farmers have grown used to these public handouts. On the other hand, federal commitments to clean vehicle and energy R&D have been shortchanged, dwindling to nearly nothing. As a result, real fuel and vehicle solutions that could serve the public interest just cannot compete with corn.

From Page 99:

Corn ethanol is expensive and provides little or no environmental benefit. The only societal benefit is a small reduction in oil imports, but gained at a huge cost. The political success of U.S. corn ethanol demonstrates how narrow special interests can steer federal policy and trump the public interest. Surprisingly, policymakers and the public have steadfastly supported corn ethanol without first determining if this domestic fuel is in America’s best interest. Special interests—American farmers and agribusiness giants in particular—have convinced the public that corn ethanol deserves broad support. It does not.

What we need to do is dig more deeply.

More promising biofuels do exist. These are fuels made from the vast array of cellulosic plant materials: grasses, fast-growing trees, municipal trash, and crop residues. They’re abundant and they’re not crops that would otherwise nourish people. For a given plot of land, cellulosic biofuels have a far smaller carbon footprint than corn. And cellulosic material can even be grown on marginal lands not suitable to farming.

Beyond biofuels, electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are other promising options worth investing in.

The transportation sector is in need of a transformation. It is up to policymakers, industry, and consumers to set clear goals, advance innovative products, and make wise choices so we can accommodate two billion cars on earth.

Learn more about Two Billion Cars at the Oxford University Press website. Visit Deborah Gordon's website and Daniel Sperling's faculty webapge.

--Marshal Zeringue

C.A.J. Coady's "Messy Morality"

With an international reputation for his research in both epistemology and political and applied philosophy, C. A. J. (Tony) Coady is one of Australia's best-known philosophers. His recent publications include Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge, 2007).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his book Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 introduces an objection to my line of argument concerning corruption that I then proceed to analyse and reject. I hope it is sufficiently intriguing to satisfy Ford Madox Ford’s requirements.

The book aims to chart a viable course between several attractive but dangerous philosophical reefs besetting the good ships morality and politics. The first two chapters propose and develop an unusual interpretation of the outlook of “political realism”. This doctrine is commonly read as advocating a form of amoralism regarding politics and international relations. As such, it is easily refuted, but I suggest that we can learn from realism by viewing it as warning against certain distortions of morality, distortions that I call moralism. The realists own best insights are obscured by outright rejection of a role for morality and devotion to a murky concept of national interest in its place. I explore what moralism means in the context of politics and show why it endangers a feasible commitment to a moral engagement with politics.

Chapter 3 discusses the concept of ideals, the analysis of which is much neglected and the positive value of which for politics is often rejected. I explore the nature of ideals and defend their importance for politics against arguments purporting to show that they are useless or positively dangerous. In chapter 4, I seek to unravel the fashionable thesis that it is necessary to have “dirty hands” in politics. This claims that, although morality certainly applies to politics, politicians should occasionally violate the deepest moral prohibitions. The thesis may not make sense (how can it be right to do wrong?) but if it does make sense there remain formidable obstacles to its being true. In the final chapter, I discuss the nature and moral significance of lying and other forms of deceit and relate this to the challenges of political life.

Page 99 starts a section dealing with an objection to the concept of corrupt character, a concept I employ in connection with dirty hands. The objection holds that there is no such thing as character. So, Gilbert Harman has argued that psychological research has refuted the idea of character, showing that belief in it is a product of the “fundamental attribution error”. I argue against this that Harman’s resort to the attribution error and his use of counter-examples in connection with the supposed error is fatally flawed.

Read more about Messy Morality at the Oxford University Press website.

Learn more about Tony Coady at his webpage at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.

--Marshal Zeringue