Patricia J. Fanning's "Influenza and Inequality"

Patricia J. Fanning is professor and chairperson of the Department of Sociology at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts and the author of Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day.

She applied “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Influenza and Inequality: One Town’s Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918, and reported the following:

The US populations most seriously affected by the influenza epidemic of 1918 were young adult, lower class, and foreign born. My book, Influenza and Inequality, is the only account of a local response (Norwood, Massachusetts) to that outbreak and thus gets to the heart of the experience. When the epidemic struck and its primary victims were identified as immigrants, the official response was quick and sharp. An Emergency Hospital was opened; theaters, churches, and soda fountains were closed. More telling, newspapers and reports suggested that unsanitary living conditions, deficient personal hygiene, and a lack of assimilation were the causes of the spread of influenza and the victims were blamed for their plight. Authorities searched only immigrant neighborhoods and transported the sick, often against their will, to the Emergency Hospital where they received minimal attention due to overcrowding. Uninformed and failing to comprehend the crisis, immigrants became fearful and resistant. On Page 99 we learn about the results of these actions: over half the town’s deaths occurred among the Lithuanian, Polish, and Italian immigrant populations. On the facing page, there is a map of the town which includes the locations of influenza victims’ residences, significantly clustered in the segregated ethnic enclaves.

To bring the story to life, I utilized primary sources including official reports and minutes, newspaper accounts, death and cemetery records, diaries and memoirs. I also collected family stories to piece together the lives of those left behind. Page 99 includes a few of these accounts:

For those who had lost loved ones in the epidemic, life would never be the same. Emma Maki's seven children were taken in by relatives and friends. Anna Cvilikas's sons grew to adulthood believing their stepmother was their mother. Other children were raised by grandparents, relatives, and friends. Mary Drummey, the child whose mother had died at Norwood Hospital after giving birth, recalled that, although her father visited her often, she never lived with him; instead, her grandmother raised her. These and other families set about the task of trying to survive. As one Lithuanian-American woman recalled, “The old timers would get together at our house and talk quite a bit about the old country, coming here and the early times. There were hard, difficult times both in Lithuania and here. The flu was always spoken of as one of the hardships, just one more hardship that had to be faced.”

I hope that my book’s close examination of one town’s struggle illuminates how even well-intentioned elite groups may adopt and implement strategies that can exacerbate rather than relieve a medical crisis. It is a cautionary tale about community, disease, and our options for judging individual lives as either dispensable or of consequence.

Read more about Influenza and Inequality at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Winkler's "Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America"

Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been featured on CNN and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.

He applied “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Gunfight, you’ll find this sentence: “Those who looked into the history of the Second Amendment discovered that the right to bear arms was a lot older than most Americans ever imagined.” Indeed, Gunfight reveals that so much of what Americans imagine about guns and our gun culture is wrong—and that the true story is a lot more interesting and nuanced than either side in the gun debate acknowledges.

Although the Supreme Court only recently declared that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to own guns, the right is one of our oldest, most well-established rights. Nearly all the states’ own constitutions include a guarantee of an individual right to bear arms and, as Gunfight details, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution was motivated by the desire to protect the freedmen’s rights, including specifically their right to bear arms (which was being threatened by racist posses, like the KKK).

Yet gun control is as much a part of the story of guns in America as the Second Amendment and six-shooter. The Founding Fathers had gun control laws so restrictive that if Madison, the author of the Second Amendment, were running for office today, the NRA wouldn’t endorse him. The Wild West, the heart of America’s gun culture, had the most burdensome and vigorously enforced gun control in the nation. For most of its history, the NRA was a proponent of gun control; it wasn’t until an internal “coup” by hard-line members in 1977 that the organization became the no-compromises opponent of gun safety laws we know.

Gunfight shows that we’ve always balanced gun rights and gun control—and that these efforts have shaped America in fascinating and surprising ways.

Learn more about Gunfight at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Abulafia's "The Great Sea"

David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University.

He applied “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, and reported the following:

My own page 99 occurs at the end of a chapter, so it is only half a page. But it concerns themes that run right through the book, which begins in 22,000 BC and ends in AD 2010. The history of the Mediterranean is the history of the movement of people and peoples, carrying goods and ideas (including religions) across the long but quite narrow span of a sea that was, to quote the final words of the book, ‘probably the most vigorous place of interaction between different societies on the face of this planet, and it has played a role in the history of human civilisation that has far surpassed any other expanse of sea’.

Here I am writing about the ancient Greek settlers who headed westwards from great trading cities such as Corinth, and trying to explain why they were willing to move from the relative safety of Greece to little-known lands far away, a question that has some resonance for readers in the United States. But I am also pointing to the next chapter by mentioning a famous Corinthian who settled not among fellow Greeks but among their powerful rivals the Etruscans, whose own lively civilization was impregnated with Greek culture. Thanks to the Greeks, the Etruscans and the Phoenicians of modern Lebanon the entire Mediterranean was opened up to trade, settlement and conquest for the first time in its history.

... In the end it is a chicken and egg question. There were many motives that might send a Greek city-dweller overseas in this period: at the top of the social scale, there were political exiles; lower down, there were merchants and shipowners with an eye on new markets; there were craftsmen who had become aware of surging demand for their products as far away as Italy and southern France; there were others in search of land to cultivate in the lands out to the west. Colonisation was not a symptom of poverty at home, but of growing wealth and the wish to build further on the early successes of Corinth and the other cities which created daughter settlements in the Mediterranean. And yet, as the career of Demaratos of Corinth showed, there were also other lands over the horizon where the Greeks could only settle as guests of powerful indigenous peoples. The most important of these peoples were the Etruscans.

Read more about The Great Sea at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Kazin's "American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation"

Michael Kazin is professor of history at Georgetown University. His books include America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (with M. Isserman), The Populist Persuasion: An American History, Barons of Labor, and A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. He is coeditor of Dissent, a frequent contributor to numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Nation, and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and twice from the Fulbright Scholar Program.

Kazin applied “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, and reported the following:

Page 99 describes the political weakness of the woman suffrage movement in the late 19th century. Activists for the vote waged numerous campaigns in individual states but were victorious in only a few Western ones with small populations. One reason, I argue, was that suffragists made their case in individualist terms in an era when reform-minded Americans were increasingly thinking of society as an interdependent organism. At the same time, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the founding mothers of the suffrage movement, published a feminist revision of the Bible which was, as she knew, immensely controversial and difficult for most of her activist sisters to defend.

In the larger scope of U.S. history, the left was often successful in expanding the meaning of individual freedom. It helped free the slaves, legitimize sexual pleasure outside of marriage, make it impossible to continue the military draft, and initiated the gay liberation movement. But suffragists would not triumph until its champions persuaded most Americans, of both genders, that votes for women would do much to turn the U.S. into more humane, even homelike society.

Read more about the book at the Knopf website.

The Page 69 Test: A Godly Hero.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Smithson's "Germ Gambits"

Amy Smithson is a Senior Fellow at the Washington, D.C. Office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies where she researches issues related to chemical and biological weapons proliferation, threat reduction mechanisms, and homeland security. Before joining the James Martin Center, she worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Henry L. Stimson Center—where she founded the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project. Previously, she worked for Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation and the Center for Naval Analyses. The author, co-author, or editor of 16 books and book-length reports, as well as numerous articles, Smithson has appeared frequently before Congress and is a regular commentator in the electronic and print media.

She applied “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Germ Gambits: The Bioweapons Dilemma, Iraq and Beyond, and reported that it passed the test:

Germ Gambits is a tale of high stakes gambling in which Iraq tried to hide its germ weapons program from United Nations (UN) inspectors, risking additional punishment for breaking the ceasefire conditions for the 1991 war initiated to oust Iraq from Kuwait. At a time when common wisdom held that inspections of biological facilities were futile, the inspectors entered Iraq with scant intelligence about Iraq’s bioweapons program and were pitted against an army of Iraqis attempting to deceive them and conceal Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs. Iraq had manufactured and weaponized enough biowarfare agents to kill the world’s population many times over, so the security and public health ramifications of this situation were stratospheric. Had the inspectors not detected the program, Saddam, who had already used poison gas in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War and against his own civilians, would have retained a devastating weapon. Instead, the inspectors uncovered sufficient evidence to force Iraq to admit that it made biowarfare agents on July 1, 1995.

The inspectors told the Iraqis this account made no sense, that Iraq must have also loaded these agents into weapons. Rolf Ekeus, the UN’s chief inspector, told the UN Security Council as much. Then, on August 7, 1995 the man at the center of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Kamal Hassan, defected. Worried that Kamal would tell all to the inspectors, Baghdad rushed to spill the beans first.

Page 99 of Germ Gambits picks up the story in mid-August 1995, with Ekeus hearing Iraq’s second confession in as many months. As the inspectors had suspected, Iraq had loaded missile warheads and bombs with biowarfare agents.

As the account emerged over the course of a couple of days, Ekeus was not convinced that he was getting the whole story. At one point he appealed personally to Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz for the truth. “I told him that he had misled me for such a long time, that he had lied about Iraq having no biological weapons. I asked him how I could trust him. Again,” recalled Ekeus, “Aziz blamed everything on Hussein Kamal.” Aziz’s reply was no surprise to Ekeus, who observed, “People have forgotten the systematic and fantastic lying by the top Iraqi leaders.” Kamal, Aziz contended, kept everyone in the dark, hiding the truth about the bioweapons program even from his closest aid, General Amer Rasheed, whose wife, Rihab Taha, ran the bioweapons program. The preposterousness of that assertion did not faze Aziz. Just after accusing Kamal and telling Ekeus he had no responsibility for the biological portfolio, Aziz claimed personal credit for withholding information on biological weapons.

During the next two days, the Iraqis paraded people in front of Ekeus to relate what they had done in the nuclear, chemical, biological, or missile programs. Aziz or Rasheed repeatedly encouraged Ekeus’s staff to “ask anything” and then shouted at each hapless individual to tell the UNSCOM delegation whatever they wanted to know. “I’m sure these poor people didn’t tell us everything because they were scared,” said Ekeus. “The whole episode had an atmosphere almost of panic.”

While the inspectors did not find out every last detail about Iraq’s bioweapons program, they successfully alerted the international community to this illicit weapons program, accomplishing what many thought was impossible.

The inspectors themselves tell how they pulled off this feat in Germ Gambits, which has significant policy implications. In 2002 the international community abandoned efforts to add inspection provisions to the 1975 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which bans these arms but has been egregiously violated. Among other recommendations, the inspectors argue that the international community should learn from their experience. The book’s final chapter places this tale in the broader perspective of mankind’s worrisome track record with germ weapons and the life sciences revolution now underway that could inadvertently generate additional manmade biological risks.

Learn more about Germ Gambits at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeanne Guillemin's "American Anthrax"

Jeanne Guillemin is a senior fellow in the Security Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Center for International Studies. She is the author of Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak and Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism.

She applied “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, American Anthrax: Fear, Crime, and the Investigation of the Nation's Deadliest Bioterror Attack, and reported that it passed the test:

Page 99 of American Anthrax picks up the story of the letter attacks in late October 2001, just after President Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act and declared the administration’s “war on terror.” Two Washington, DC, postal workers, Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen, had just died of inhalational anthrax. The US Postal Service and the Centers for Disease Control had been denying the health risks to postal employees across the board, despite clear signs that spores had leaked from three anthrax letters aimed at media targets in New York City and Boca Raton, Florida and a fourth letter, to US Senator Tom Daschle (a fifth letter, to Senator Patrick Leahy, was discovered in November, 2001). In reaction to the two deaths, the CDC pitched in to protect exposed workers, and Jack Potter, the Postmaster General, had to explain to the American public that the US mail was not necessarily safe to handle without gloves.

But who had sent the anthrax letters, which ultimately killed five people, sickened another 17, and exposed thousands of others to danger? Vice-President Cheney’s belief was that al Qaeda, armed with anthrax from Iraq, was the source, and that the next attack on the United States would be with smallpox. In contrast, FBI’s experts believed that a “lone wolf” scientist had perpetrated the anthrax attacks. After five years of meticulous research, the FBI was able to match the DNA of the letters’ anthrax spores to that of spores in a flask at the US Army’s infectious disease laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Bruce Ivins, the microbiologist in charge of that flask, soon became the Bureau’s prime suspect. But Ivins’ suicide in July 2008 made it impossible to bring the case to trial.

Were the letters sent by a foreign enemy or the result of a serious breakdown in US national security? The weight of known evidence points to Ivins, a troubled individual whose long-time work developing anthrax vaccines was about to be phased out, but the debate continues.

Learn more about American Anthrax at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lucia Greenhouse’s "fathermothergod"

Lucia Greenhouse, a graduate of the Emma Willard School and Brown University, lives with her husband and four children in Westchester County, New York.

She applied “Page 99 Test” to fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science, her first book, and reported the following:

I was skeptical about the Page 99 test, and then, before I even snuck a peak at my most important (my only) page 99, I felt defensive. As a first-time author, the notion that “the quality of the whole” of an arbitrarily assigned page could be a litmus test for an entire book scared the heck out of me: what if page 99 happened to be the weakest page of my book? What if it marked nothing more than a divider page, or whatever those blank pages are called? What if avid Page 99ers tested fathermothergod and decided, based on that score alone, not to read further (or, more aptly, not to flip back to page 1?) My stomach was in knots. I cursed Ford Madox Ford.

But then curiosity took over. I opened, roughly, to the first third of the book, (fathermothergod is slightly over 300 pages long) and quickly found 99. I started reading. I stopped reading. I smiled. And I was stunned. The central conflict of fathermothergod jumped off the page.

“I’m just going upstairs to read a bit,” she attempts to say casually, as though tonight is an average evening, not Christmas Eve. But her voice cracks, and she clears her throat. Dad follows right behind her.

Olivia, Terry, Sherman, and I are left staring at the doorway.

“What do you think is wrong?” I ask in a lowered voice.

“She’s been upstairs practically all afternoon,” Olivia says.

“She looks awful,” Sherman says.

Perhaps because Terry is still new to the family, he keeps quiet.

“What are we going to do?” Olivia asks.

Later that night, I can’t sleep. I lie in my bed on my right side, facing the empty twin bed where my sister used to sleep. Now she is downstairs on the pullout sofa with Terry. I remember the month before, when we were at Aunt Nan and Uncle Dave’s home in Connecticut for Thanksgiving. Mom had been under the weather then too. Sherman, Mom, Dad, and I had driven out from the city together, with a stopover as usual at the Christian Science church in Pleasantville for its Thanksgiving service. Mom stood up to give a testimony, which was standard, but her words, come to think of it, were not.

“Sometimes,” she said, grasping the pew in front of her, “healings are instantaneous. And other times, they are slower to come to fruition. I am so grateful for the healing power of Divine Science.”

My gut tightens, and a feeling of panic grips me. I realize this illness may well have been going on for a while.

Learn more about the book and author at Lucia Greenhouse's website.

--Marshal Zeirngue

Jenny Diski's "What I Don't Know About Animals"

Jenny Diski was born in London, where she has lived most of her life. She is the author of ten novels, four books of travel and memoir, two volumes of essays and a collection of short stories. Her journalism has appeared in the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the London Review of Books, among other publications.

She applied “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, What I Don't Know About Animals, and reported the following:

From page 99:

While watching the mating habits of stag beetles, Oddie narrated: 'He crash-lands on top of a likely looking lady. There's a bit of luck. One thing is sure, this boy is horny.' After a fight between two male beetles for a female, he put on a mimsy 'female' voiced and said, "Come on, big boy, come and get it."

There were complaints, but, as much as the cute chicks, Oddie's anthropomorphism was a great factor in the popularity of the programme. Partly, it was the joy of watching car-crash television; partly his anthropomorphism voiced the real responses of a large proportion of his viewers. Serious zoologists are not allowed to compare animal social behaviour to human society, but everyone secretly does (doubtless even many of the serious zoologists about their own dogs and cats), and the audience rejoiced in it. But underneath the jocular misrepresentation of animals, there seemed to be a genuine bitterness, something quite disturbing, and it wasn't surprising to learn that Oddie suffers from bouts of depression. We watched as Kate, wide-eyed, ever-smiling, seemed to struggle not to let her embarrassment show on camera.

The subject of page 99 is a cozy TV programme called Springwatch that gets millions of viewers each year. The passage speaks for itself. Like those millions of viewers (and Jacques Derrida who wonders very hard what his cat is thinking as it gazes up at him standing morning naked in the bathroom) I have trouble allowing animals to be as unknowable as the Lord. But I think in the end attempting to unknow animals in our own image is the best chance we have of learning to respect them and accord both ourselves and them dignity.

Learn more about the book and author at Jenny Diski's website and the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donna Hicks's "Dignity: The Essential Role it Plays in Resolving Conflict"

Donna Hicks is an Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She also works as a consultant to corporations and organizations, applying her dignity model to everyday business and relational situations.

She applied “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dignity: The Essential Role It Plays in Resolving Conflict in Our Lives and Relationships, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, Dignity, represents one of the central messages in the book: Don’t take the bait: Don’t let the undignified behavior of others determine your own. Here is a direct quote:

The temptation to respond to a threat with a threat, to take the bait, as it were, may be an illustration of the downside of mirror neurons. Earlier in the book I described the discovery of these special cells in our brain that enable us to feel what another person is feeling. These neurons help us read the emotional experience of others. When someone else is feeling sad, these neurons automatically stimulate the same neurons in us, making us feel sad, too. It is a wonderful gift when these neurons enable us to feel compassion, to connect us with others in primal empathy. But the neurons also have the power to incite in ourselves the anger, hatred, and negativity that someone else is feeling.

The natural reaction to want to lash back and defend oneself when someone had done us wrong is part of our self-preservation instincts. They propel us into action without having to think about it. The problem is, returning an indignity with another indignity makes us perpetrators. So much violence is committed when we feel we are righteously justified in returning the harm. What we don’t see at the time, because our fight instincts have taken over, is how undignified our own behavior is. In cases like this, holding back that impulse for revenge or to get even is our greatest challenge. The better part of dignity is restraint. In order to live a dignified life, we often have to hold back those instincts, such as not taking the bait, and other times, we need to assert ourselves when our instincts tell us to do nothing. For example, when someone treats us badly, we need to fight the all-too-familiar tendency to say nothing and avoid confrontation with the person who has harmed us. But there is a big difference between defending your dignity when some hurts you, and lashing back. The book illustrates how to defend your dignity without violating the dignity of the person who harmed you.

The book is filled with practical demonstrations of how to honor the dignity of others, as well as how to embrace our own dignity. So many people I have worked with over the years had suffered from a feeling of worthlessness and self-doubt. This book walks readers through simple steps to recognize the many ways that we undermine our own dignity, as well as the dignity of others. Dignity has the power to turn self-doubt into a genuine feeling of well-being. It also has the power to transform relationships, even relationships that have broken under the weight of conflict, into strong, healthy, and mutually satisfying connections. The most important thing to know is this: if indignity tears us apart, dignity can put us back together again.

Learn more about the book and author at Donna Hicks's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Harline’s "Conversions"

Craig Harline is the author of Sunday: A History of the First Day From Babylonia to the Super Bowl, and several other books from Yale University Press. He is Professor of History in the Department of History at Brigham Young University.

Harline applied “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of this book, which is about how families of the sixteenth-century Reformation handled religious conversion, features a young man in California in 1973 eager to share his new Mormon faith with others. What in the world? you ask. Don’t worry, I asked myself the same thing.

The Californian is there because when I first found the Reformation story that made me want to explore the topic of conversion (a story featuring a young Dutchman who became Catholic in 1654 and tore his family apart), it all sounded terribly familiar, even personal. Historians often sense personal connection to the stories they write, but I’d never had the desire to actually explain that connection in public. The past is too Other to compare easily to life now, and revealing your reasons for wanting to write a story could be really embarrassing. But just this once I wanted to say explicitly what I thought the Reformation had to do with life right now.

My strongest connection with the Reformation story turned out to be the story of an old friend, whom I call Michael Sunbloom. Like the young Dutchman, he converted to a religion his family didn’t like (Mormonism). They didn’t quite disown him, but close. A typical Reformation story so far. Then came the modern twist: after three years as a Mormon, Michael realized he was gay, and quit the church. His parents were delighted that he left, but more perplexed than ever when they found out why. Yet in the end, they, unlike the Dutch family, found a way to reconcile.

I decided to tell both stories, in alternating chapters, even though they occurred in different contexts and had different endings, because to me they were, once translated---or converted---the same story. I thought they would show nicely the deep connection between even the distant past and the present, and that told together they would each have greater meaning than if told alone, in the same way a conversion table gives deeper meaning both to something familiar and unfamiliar. Thus the “Conversions” of the book’s title refers not only to the usual religious sort, but to a sort of historical conversion. When an old and faraway story starts looking like one that happened right around you, then the past becomes not only more interesting, but more meaningful as well. That’s why California-boy Michael Sunbloom is on page 99 of a book about the Reformation.

Learn more about Conversions at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue