Brian D. Behnken's "Fighting Their Own Battles"

Brian D. Behnken is assistant professor in the department of history and the U.S. Latino/a studies program at Iowa State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Fighting Their Own Battles is part of the concluding section of the third chapter. It comes after a discussion of the Mexican American and African American civil rights struggles of the early 1960s and offers analysis on black-brown relations at that time. My page 99 largely confirms the Ford Madox Ford thesis.

Throughout the book I not only detail the key events of both civil rights movements, but also explain why these two communities failed to unite their respective freedom struggles. The key reasons why both groups fought their own battles include a perception that they were culturally dissimilar, class tensions, organizational differences, and geographical distance. Most importantly, racial prejudices hampered attempts to build a united movement. In particular, Mexican Americans attempted to position themselves as white people to avoid segregation, which frustrated unity with blacks.

Here is what Page 99 and a small portion of Page 100 have to say:

….This case confirms that white racial positioning still served as a tool in the Mexican American quest for rights. It further shows one reason why blacks and Mexican Americans did not unite.

Like PASO [the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations], LULAC [the League of United Latin American Citizens] continued to promote the whiteness strategy. In a letter of May 1963 to the TGNC [Texas Good Neighbor Commission], Texas regional governor William Bonilla complained about segregation at a Texas resort. In a pamphlet, the resort made clear, "No Latin Americans or Colored People [Are] Accepted." Bonilla protested the "attitude" of people who would explicitly state that "no Latin Americans are allowed." As in the 1950s, Bonilla indicated that use of the words "colored" and "Latin American" in the same sentence constituted the real problem. If it could not repair this particular situation, Bonilla implied, then the TGNC had failed. The commission's Frank Kelley then wrote to remind the resort’s owners that in Texas "the Latin race is a purely white race." This example again demonstrates that Mexican Americans continued to appeal to the government for support. It also shows that LULACers still promoted whiteness as a method of fighting for Mexican American rights.

The objectives of African Americans and Mexican Americans also paradoxically contributed to disunity. The basic goals of each group appeared identical; to end discrimination, secure rights, eradicate poverty. For many blacks and Mexican Americans, pickets, sit-ins, and political activism resembled each other. In fact, the two groups used similar tactics, although the contexts differed….So each group had similar goals and tactics, but the overall emphasis of each movement differed. This contributed to the lack of African American/Mexican American unity.

Politics also created divisions between Mexican Americans and African Americans. In previous decades, Mexican American leaders had worked diligently to nurture a close working relationship with state leaders, but their endorsement of Price Daniel over John Connally soured this relationship. In the 1960s African Americans saw a much more productive future with the segregationist Daniel out of office and a governor like Connally in the State House. Because of black support, and because JFK's assassination convinced many whites to look more favorably upon black civil rights, black Texans received more state support. Thus, a transformation took place in the Texas government as African Americans became the beneficiaries of state support while Mexican Americans received more hostile treatment. The evolution of the government's role in minority communities served to once again divide the movements. Blacks and Mexican Americans ultimately found themselves in competition for state support, not in cooperation.

What Page 99 leaves out are the instances of black-brown collaboration that occurred throughout the era. For instance, only a handful of pages before Page 99 I detail the legendary filibuster of state senator Henry B. Gonzalez, who railed against anti-integration legislation proposed by the state House in 1957. He was broadly supported by the African American community. The following chapter explores the Mexican American "Minimum Wage March" of 1966, which blacks also supported. And Chapter 5 examines ecumenical activism in Texas, a movement that attempted to bring blacks, whites, and browns together to fight for voting rights, antipoverty aid, and integrated neighborhoods. Thus while Page 99 captures several of the main causes of African American and Mexican American disunity, it misses the instances of cooperation discussed elsewhere in Fighting Their Own Battles.

Learn more about Fighting Their Own Battles at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary Scott Smith's "Heaven in the American Imagination"

Gary Scott Smith chairs the History Department at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Heaven in the American Imagination, and reported the following:

My book argues that while American conceptions of heaven, as expressed in literature, sermons, art, and music, have typically been rooted in religious traditions and been based on interpretations of relevant scriptural passages, they have usually been closely connected to what was happening on earth. Americans have tended to imagine an afterlife that contains what they judge to be the “best, most lasting, virtuous, and meaningful” aspects of this life and eliminates those things they consider “the most difficult, frustrating, evil, and inessential.”

Deeply influenced by their own life experiences and their different political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances, Americans have sharply disagreed about what heavenly life will be like. Although most Americans have claimed to derive their images of heaven solely from the Bible, they also display their dreams, hopes, and visions of the good life. Their depictions of celestial life shed substantial light on what Americans have most treasured and feared in various eras.

Page 99 illustrates this thesis by its analysis of how heaven was viewed during the Civil War. Here’s the key paragraph from that page:

Antebellum Americans’ view of death and the afterlife, in the words of Mark Schantz, made it easier for soldiers “to kill and be killed” and for their loved ones to emotionally accept their deaths. Influenced primarily by evangelical Protestantism, Romanticism, and the culture of ancient Greece, most soldiers strove to meet “death with a spirit of calm resignation,” aware that their society prized heroic action and confident that eternal rewards awaited them. Their views of the hereafter, concern about how they would be remembered, deathbed behavior, and the antebellum image of death combined to create a cultural climate that made the slaughter of the Civil War possible. Large numbers of Americans were able to “face death with resignation and even joy” because they possessed “a comforting and compelling vision of eternal life.” For most of them, heaven was not an ethereal, vague region, but rather “a material place” where individuals “would be perfected and the relations of family and friendship restored.” Their confidence that they would spend eternity with God and loved ones in a magnificent abode without any trials or suffering enabled many soldiers to fight fearlessly and furiously, contributing to the war’s astounding death tolls.

Learn more about Heaven in the American Imagination at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Humes's "Force of Nature"

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart's Green Revolution, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Force of Nature marks a turning point in Wal-Mart’s journey to the sustainable side -- one that easily could have been a turning-back point. Instead of backpedalling, however, the mega-retailer’s CEO publicly committed to an unprecedented effort to green its massive global business.

I know, I know. Wal-Mart? Green? Seriously?

Skepticism is justified. I had to see the hard data before I could accept that Wal-Mart, our national monument to consumption, really had committed, however imperfectly, to being more planet-friendly. Force of Nature is about how that happened, why it matters, and how many other businesses are being persuaded to do the same -- the beginning, perhaps, of a second industrial revolution.

The story begins when Jib Ellison, a tree-hugging river guide-turned business consultant who lives off the grid north of San Francisco, landed the CEO of Wal-Mart as his first sustainability client. Wal-Mart’s chief at the time, H. Lee Scott, had tired of all the criticisms aimed at his compan. He asked Ellison, in effect, to get the environmentalists off his back.

But Ellison had more than image repair in mind. He saw Wal-Mart as a giant laboratory for proving the business case for sustainability. He wanted to show Scott that doing environmental good was neither charity nor burden, but an enormous business opportunity.

Page 99 reveals what happened next. During Ellison’s first year at Wal-Mart, Hurricane Katrina struck. Wal-Mart delivered free food, water and medicine to disaster victims, and the company’s reputation soared. A main reason for hiring Ellison vanished. Sustainability could safely be dropped.

Lee, however, had come to agree with Ellison. In one early effort, they shaved a few inches off a toy truck package and saved 4,000 trees. But something else happened: Smaller packages required 497 fewer shipping containers to pack and a million fewer barrels of oil to ship. Wal-Mart saved $2.4 million. It would take selling $60 million in toys to earn that same amount. Asked Scott: If one greener product could accomplish that, what could greening them all do?

On page 99, Lee publicly explains how he wanted Wal-Mart to be like the company that responded to Katrina all the time. As far as he was concerned, Earth’s environment had become a “Katrina in slow motion.” He vowed to pursue sustainability as the cure... and to make money doing it, profit and planet joined instead of conflicting.

Learn more about the book and author at Edward Humes's website.

The Page 69 Test: Edward Humes's Monkey Girl.

Humes's Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet was one of the top ten environmental books of 2009.

Writers Read: Edward Humes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacey Peebles's "Welcome to the Suck"

Stacey Peebles is Assistant Director of the Lloyd International Honors College, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq, and reported the following:

The critic Susan Jeffords argued in her book The Remasculinization of America that during and after the Vietnam War, the power of the masculine collective, a community forged in war and represented extensively back in the States, effectively remade or “remasculinized” the American cultural landscape. (Think First Blood, Missing in Action, even The Deer Hunter.)

I was curious if the same could be said of the Iraq War, and devoted a chapter of my larger study of the first wave of contemporary war stories to that question. War has always shaped our conceptions of gender, from strong-armed Achilles in the Iliad to Rosie the Riveter in World War II. What effects can we see in the 21st century?

Page 99 answers that question with regard to two military memoirists: Nathaniel Fick, author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, and Kayla Williams, author of Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army. As it turns out, things have changed. Both Fick and Williams emphasize the ruptures in their own sense of masculinity and the corollary failure of the masculine collective. (Yes, Williams is female, but as Judith Halberstam has noted, masculinity becomes most legible when it leaves the white, male, middle-class body. And Williams’ smart, tough competence and dedication to the group certainly qualify as the classic criteria of military masculinity.) In sum:

For Nathaniel Fick, the logic of military masculinity is a reductio ad absurdum. Hardness [or extreme toughness and uncompromising competence] is key to being a real man, he learns, and he gets harder and harder until he realizes that the leadership role he has undertaken requires him not just to protect and guide his fellow soldiers, but also to sacrifice them if necessary. The hardness that brings the group together—the tests they all pass, the impossible tasks they all complete, the stoicism they all inculcate within themselves—is the same hardness that can potentially lead to the group’s annihilation. That, as he concludes, is too hard.

Finally, Williams, who struggles so mightily to be accepted only to fail in the end. She can hardly be called a pioneer—there have been too many women serving in too many capacities for that—but her story does mark what is perhaps a crucial turning point in the history of gender and the American military. She sees and acts on the potential for crossing boundaries—as a female soldier and as a scholar of Arabic. But Williams is denied true acceptance into the tight circle of military comradeship, and that sense of personal betrayal leads to a recognition of larger, political betrayals as well, like Shane’s [her boyfriend and a fellow soldier] inability to secure proper medical care.

In particular, Williams’ thwarted desire to transcend traditional gender norms reflects a larger pattern that we see in these new war stories—of soldiers who see the potential to break down these kinds of categories, but are prevented from doing so in the context of war. War tends to enforce categorization, even as it forces encounters across the boundaries of media, gender, nation, and the body. Welcome to the Suck traces that pattern through a selection of literature, film, and new media.

Read more about Welcome to the Suck at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Au's "This Won't Hurt a Bit"

Michelle Au graduated from Wellesley College in 1999, received her M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2003, and completed her residency in anesthesiology at the Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan. She is married to Dr. Joseph Walrath, has two sons, and lives in Atlanta, where she is an anesthesiologist in a private practice.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, This Won't Hurt a Bit: And Other White Lies - My Education in Medicine and Motherhood, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

“How do you do it?” I asked my intern once when I was a third-year medical student. I was watching her juggle twenty-five patients, a ceaseless stream of urgent pages, three simultaneous emergencies, all while drinking a full cup of coffee without spilling a drop. She had at this point been awake for the past twenty-seven hours.

“You just do it,” she answered cryptically, one-handedly typing a note into the computer while picking up the phone to answer her latest page. At the time, I didn’t really understand this philosophy, which I had heard from several other residents before—chalked it up as one of those nonsensical sayings like, “It is what it is,” stemming from a culturally saturating Nike ad campaign. But when I started my sub-I—started being on the receiving end of those endless pages, the first person called in an emergency, realizing that for the first time, I was not simply a passive observer or an extra set of hands but actually responsible for these patients under my care—I got it. You just do it. You can’t think about how much there is to do, or how much is going on, or how tired you are. There’s no time for that. So you just do it. You put your head down and get to work, and at the end of the night you look up and realize that you got through it all. And then you go home and come back the next morning and do it again. This is what I am learning from my sub-I*. I am learning that I can do this.

Most of the time.

*sub-I stands for “subintership” which is a requirement for med students to graduate. It is an internship working for a first year resident (usually referred to as“interns”).

I do love the dropping into a story in media res, and I think that this is the perfect place to sample from the book, and highlights one key theme, which is that people training in medicine find themselves eventually able to do things that they didn’t think they would be able to do before they started.

You never quite feel ready to have the responsibility of taking care of patients on your own, but at some point in your training the moment comes upon all of us to sink or swim. And almost all of us, sometimes to our own surprise, find that we can swim. It’s that moment that you realize that, the first moment that you see something happening and make a clinical decision and act on it, all on your own—that’s the essence of learning to become a doctor.

It’s that kind of instinct that is the essence of becoming a parent as well, and though this particular excerpt on page 99 doesn’t get a chance to get into that, it sets things up for later in the book, where the story expands to how I try to juggle having a baby and being a medical resident at the same time. How, with two equally and completely consuming jobs, does one decide which to prioritize in any given moment? How are you supposed to “do it all”? Same way as you did before. You keep your head down, keep your eye on what’s important, and take care of what you need to do. You just do it.

Learn more about the book and author at Michelle Au's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nina Eliasoph's "Making Volunteers"

Nina Eliasoph is associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Avoiding Politics: Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making Volunteers brings us into an evening meeting of youth volunteers. The adults who had set up this youth group are hoping that volunteering will “empower” the teens. It’s a terrific goal, but it sometimes works in ways that are better than the stated goals, and often goes awry.

This youth group is an example of what the book names “Empowerment Projects:” organizations that blend private, public, or nonprofit funds, with a mantra you’ve no doubt heard a hundred times: “participatory, open, innovative, multicultural, grassroots, local, comfortable, intimate, and transparent.” All these missions are worthy, but when they collide with one another, they transform (for example, can you be “innovative” and “comfortable” at the same time? “Open” and “intimate?”) When we say “voluntary associations” or “social service agencies,” we’re usually imagining these semi-voluntary, semi-government organizations whose refrain is Empowerment Talk. More and more prevalent since the 70’s, all over the world, they’re transforming volunteer work and government, simultaneously.

In this scene, I am sitting in a circle of fold-up chairs in a gym, with the teens and the adult organizers, while they plan a series of charitable visits to a children’s hospital. A girl in shredded, black tights keeps squirming and flirting and making jokes, with restless, erotic energy. The other kids seem much more sensible and reasonable, lacking her rebellious, impractical energy. I’m mournfully wishing that she could unleash some of her utopia energy for use in this group, and I’m simultaneously chastising myself for hanging onto an outmoded, impractical utopianism. For sociology, it’s odd to use one’s own feelings to discover bigger questions, but it works here. It me notice how these projects can domesticate the spirit.

They domesticate the spirit in ways that aren’t all bad, either. The girl turns out to be a pro-capital punishment, anti-abortion religious fanatic. Most kids in the group are not like that, and I’m not, either. So much for my inner cheerleading for utopian rebellion. Despite my qualms, I have to buck to the evidence: if the government funds projects like this, and if they’re going to be “open to all,” they can’t be too hotly partisan, and that's okay, though the adult organizers might think otherwise, since among their many missions is a fervent hope to cultivate teens’ hot passion and political engagement. Such pro’s and con’s abound in Empowerment Projects.

Here's page 99:

...asking teens to take themselves as the objects of knowledge, not the inspired sources of it; to treat themselves as members of a social category, not just to draw on their own unique personal experience; to value knowledge, not just inspiration. Could it work here, in a program like this? It is hard to imagine how, without making a big change in the program’s design.

Her approach had problems. When Laura asked about their direct experience, they responded that they learned better in English. She did not like that answer and ignored them, giving them impersonal, large-scale data, instead—a fine, deft move if she were in a debate club or social studies class, in which participants should presume that no single individual’s impressions give the whole picture. In a program like this, there was no time or will to investigate both sides, though both sides had good research to support them.9 Since Laura’s lesson was only one-sided, it was just another lesson in ignoring disagreement.

An even more perilous alternative to political avoidance appeared in some meetings of the Regional YEP. I was craving the gritty texture of youthful rebelliousness, and feeling forlorn that these fifteen-, sixteen-, and seventeen-year-olds seemed so tame, decent, docile, methodical, and practical, with all their attention directed to planning and budgets. One evening, a rebellious-seeming teen came to the Regional YEP, bristling with impossible, passionate, almost erotic urgency. I watched her squirm, giggle, and whisper in her molded plastic chair and her ripped black tights. Secretly, I felt relieved.

Then, noticing that the other, more dedicated youth volunteers were glaring at her, I silently chastised myself for feeling charmed. Trying to emulate the serious teens’ responsible, adult-like internal demeanor, I sternly reprimanded myself, writing in my field notes later, “I really need to grow up! ... The other kids (the non-utopian ones) are so wholesome, so sensible, they really will do good realistic things. Who needs the other kind—the dreamy rebellious ones? They’re just ‘impossible.’ Forget about poetic, esthetic, impossible ideals.”

When I chatted with the rebellious girl, Meghan, during the meeting’s break, my initial delight and subsequent chagrin now turned into confusion. It turned out that she was very passionate regarding three issues: she was a born-again Christian, against legal abortion, and very much in favor of the death penalty. I personally disagreed with her positions, and yet was still a bit relieved to see a teenager acting as passionately as I imagined a teenager should act. Though I was still charmed that at least she had strong opinions, I could see that dealing with Meghan’s vehemence made other youth volunteers uneasy. VJ, Bonita, and I had been
talking, when Meghan and her friend Traci ran up, obviously trying to flirt with VJ by talking about a topic they knew he enjoyed: the recent...

Learn more about Making Volunteers at the Princeton University Press website.

Writers Read: Nina Eliasoph.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wallace Hettle's "Inventing Stonewall Jackson"

Wallace Hettle, professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa, is the author of The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inventing Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History and Memory, and reported the following:

Here’s page 99: I include the whole thing to be sure I am not stacking the deck in my favor.

“an ambition as boundless as Cromwell’s, and as merciless.” Taylor viewed Jackson’s ambition, which was “vast” and “all-absorbing,” as the mainspring behind his squabbles with his subordinates. Jackson “fought it with prayer,” Taylor stated. Engaging in speculation rather than reporting, Taylor portrayed Jackson as haunted by ambition. He “loathed it, perhaps feared it; but could not escape it—it was himself—nor rend it—it was his own flesh.” Taylor’s highly subjective account was based on an ordinary human tendency to make broad judgments about personal character based on limited evidence.

Richard Taylor provided a scathing indictment of Jackson both as a man and as a soldier, reflecting genuine mistrust between the two men. Yet Taylor had neither the desire nor the ability to trash a dead Confederate hero. Instead, he exaggerated Jackson’s eccentricity with a tone that played Jackson for laughs. He portrayed Jackson as humorless, as having “no more capacity for jests than a Scotchman.” In fact, since Jackson was “of Scotch-Irish descent,” his “unconsciousness of jokes was de race.” Taylor several times referred to Jackson’s supposed penchant for sucking on lemons, portraying the general as an ascetic who “sucked lemons, ate hard-tack, and drank water” because “praying and fighting appeared to be his idea of the ‘whole duty of man.’ ” Perhaps Taylor presented Jackson in comic terms because he thought Jackson too strange to be an icon of the Confederacy. Still, Taylor vigorously praised Jackson as a hard marcher who won victories by surprising his enemies and who tragically “fell at the summit of glory.”

Henry Kyd Douglas was for a time the youngest member of Jackson’s staff. While in his memoir he criticized Jackson for squabbling with subordinates, which “detracted much from his personal popularity” with them, his overall view of the man combined admiration with irreverent humor. He fondly recalled the day Jackson climbed a tree in pursuit of fresh persimmons, only to find himself stuck and unable to descend. Jackson remained suspended above the ground until his staff, “convulsed by laughter,” brought fence rails and “made a pair of skids to slide him to the earth.”Douglas told a number of such tales, including one in which Jackson drank from a bottle, assuming that it was wine, without “stopping to taste.” To the amusement of his staff, the general soon became “incipiently tight,” having in fact taken a large drink of whiskey. Unaware of his intoxication and feeling warm, he commenced to discuss how rapidly temperatures changed in the Shenandoah Valley.

Page 99 unmistakably represents my approach. I argue that we lack enough direct evidence to fully understand Stonewall Jackson’s character. Jackson has long been known as the Cromwell of the Confederacy, an eccentric with strange ideas about diet and religion, among other things. But because Jackson did not survive the war or write enough personal letters, much of what we know about him comes from the memories of relatives, friends, and fellow soldiers. Memory is a peculiar and unreliable thing, and these biographers and memoirists had their own agendas. With many accounts of Jackson, myth-makers tell as much about themselves as they do about Jackson. The result is that falsehoods have found their way into today’s scholarly literature and contemporary popular works. I seek to debunk the mythology surrounding Jackson by assembling a collective biography of Jackson’s early biographers, examining them to illuminate both Jackson and southern culture. My book begins with Jackson’s image during the Civil War. It closes with an examination of the 2003 film centered on an idealized Jackson, Gods and Generals, which many historians believe celebrates treason and slavery.

Page 99 provides views of Jackson from fellow Confederate officers. Richard Taylor, a fabulously wealthy Louisiana slaveholder, portrayed Jackson as a great general but a distinctly odd man. In Taylor’s view, Jackson was weird: cruel to subordinates, ambitious to a fault, and strangely obsessed with sucking on lemons. The lemon myth, as historian James I. Robertson notes, cannot be true as lemons would not be available in abundance. The page moves to the young officer Henry Kyd Douglas, who wrote a memoir full of inaccuracies. The story of Jackson getting stuck in a tree cannot be fully credited. It is the kind of tale that makes Douglas’s book a good read but a lousy resource for historians. Douglas’s book should remind us that separating fact from fiction can be both crucial and difficult.

Learn more about Inventing Stonewall Jackson at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Morganroth Gullette's "Agewise"

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is also the author of the prize-winning Declining to Decline and Aged by Culture, chosen a Notable Book of the Year by the Christian Science Monitor. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, and reported the following:

Agewise describes many under-reported parts of "the new ageism." I call it a regime of decline because it threatens all of us, from my grand-daughter Vivi at age five, to the young people who believe sexuality declines at thirty, to my friend Carol and her peers who can’t find decent jobs in their fifties and sixties, to the poor Baby Boomers being scolded (at a time of deficit and a global "aging" crisis) for becoming the most expensive generation in American history, to my dear mother in her nineties losing memories and respect in our hypercognitive era. As Publishers Weekly noted in a starred review, Agewise "takes a hard look at the connection[s]."

After undermining the worth of aging-past-youth, decline then sells useless or harmful products to the bewildered victims.

This is serious material, but any writer with a genuine voice has to utter her findings in different tones depending on the context. Just as a good nonfiction book will have an arc, so chapters have arcs. Openings may be stealthy; conclusions may resound. As it happens, page 99 is near the end of the chapter, "Hormone Nostalgia."

My research on estrogen treatments for midlife women began with my wondering what immense changes had occurred after the National Institutes of Health announced that the pills once jovially called "replacement therapy," caused cancers and heart disease instead of preventing them. I discovered a shameless effort to go on marketing hormones--to men as well as women. "Inventions fail but promises never end."

Page 99, then, is the rhetorical equivalent of a perp walk. Doctors, pharmaceutical companies that hire researchers, journalists: Many continued harking back to the days when they could rely on a facile fix, a facile profit, a facile story.

Doctors:

Even if drug research were irreproachable, doctors might still not read it. In one study, the clinicians interviewed rarely relied on research evidence; they got their "information" from other doctors, patients, and pharmaceutical companies. Since they too ignored feminist anthropologists and women’s health activists, any advice they got or gave was likely to rely on studies produced by bias.

Pharmaceutical companies:

A Hastings Center report by five highly respected gerontologists in 2003 affirms that "no currently marketed intervention--–none–has yet been proved to slow, stop or reverse human aging, and some can be downright dangerous" ... Anti-aging flacks, called in the report "clinical entrepreneurs," tend to "exaggerate the state of scientific knowledge" not just about the specific product they are working on but the whole scheme of curing humankind of old age.

Journalists:

Implicitly siding with the fantasists, or too lazy to check with the critics, the media scarcely provide equal time to monitor the claims critically.

Propelled by occasional scathing summaries like page 99, Agewise has a momentum meant to move readers forward from outrage or helplessness toward anti-ageist activism. Just as racism and sexism can be fought, so can this increasingly powerful "ism."

But as for judging "quality" from a single page, a poet writes me that he loves page 165 from the chapter, "Our Best and Longest-Running Story." A feminist quotes page 138 from "Improving Sexuality Across the Life Course." So many readers, so many judgments. (With apologies to the esteemed author of The Good Soldier.)

Read more about Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Marche's "How Shakespeare Changed Everything"

Stephen Marche is the author of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (2007) and Raymond and Hannah (2005). He currently writes "A Thousand Words About Our Culture," a monthly column for Esquire magazine, which in 2011 was a finalist for the ASME National Magazine Award for Commentary, in addition to opinion pieces for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Salon.com, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. He received a doctorate in Early Modern Drama in 2005 from the University of Toronto.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything, and reported the following:

On Page 99, I look at the speech in Henry IV, Part 1, where Hotspur mentions starlings.

I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.

In 1890, a pharmaceutical manufacturer named Eugene Schiefflin decided that he was going to release every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to the new world, and because of this speech introduced starlings to America. From the sixty birds he released, the starling population has since swollen to 200 million, wreaking havoc on the native bluebird and Flicker populations. So what I'm looking at on page 99 of the book is a good encapsulation of the book as a whole: I'm trying to see, in the lines, the power that Shakespeare had over the world, but not through the vague categories of ideas or attitudes, but in real material terms. Why did Shakespeare inspire people to do nutty things like introduce new birds to whole Continents?

Learn more about the book and author at Stephen Marche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Prager's "Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime"

Ellen Prager, a marine scientist, was formerly the chief scientist at the world’s only undersea research station, Aquarius Reef Base in the Florida Keys. She is the author of several books, including Chasing Science at Sea.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Oceans' Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter, and reported the following:

Within the sea there is a group of fishes that have a knack for immobility and a body built for angling. They are the anglerfishes, frogfishes, and their relatives; and they are described on page 99 of my new book. They are excellent examples of the weird and whacky amid the oceans, with a few surprising links to humankind.

Both the anglerfish and frogfish are big-mouthed creatures with a built-in fishing pole and lure. Their dorsal spine has been modified into a thin, flexible rod, tipped with an enticing fleshy appendage, or lure. Sitting motionless, they patiently wait for prey to near, attracted by the prospect of a tasty meal. When a victim is in range, these fishes lunge with rapid finality.

They are strange, and in some cases, goofy looking fishes with small eyes, globular bodies, and really big mouths. That is not all that is bizarre. In anglerfish, the gender differences are extreme and sex is, shall we say, unusual. Male anglerfish are only about a centimeter long, one-tenth the size of the female, and their one mission in life seems to be to find a female and latch on, literally. The male actually bites onto the female in a never-ending kiss as his mouth fuses with her skin. His internal organs then begin to degenerate, with the exception of those that produce sperm, and he becomes reliant on the female’s bloodstream for nutrition. Once mated, the tiny male anglerfish is a literal parasite of the female, living solely to produce sperm for as long as they both shall live. Sorry men.

Interestingly, scientists are studying the odd parasitic attachment of the dwarf male with the female anglerfish to learn about immune systems and endocrinology. The monkfish, a relative of the frog- and anglerfish, was once the poor man’s lobster, but is now a popular, pricey commodity gracing many a gourmand’s table. As never before we are looking to the oceans as a source of food, jobs, revenue, models for biomedical research and in biotechnology, and in the search for new drugs to improve human health. The sea’s great and strange diversity of life is not just critical to the ocean ecosystem, but also to humankind as well.

Read more about the book and author at Ellen Prager's website and the University of Chicago Press website.

Learn about the volcanic sexual activity of sea sponges, the transgendered parrotfish, and the well-endowed conch.

The Page 99 Test: Chasing Science at Sea.

--Marshal Zeringue