Veena Das' "Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty"

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Swapan was deteriorating. One night his mother discovered that he had begun to defecate in the room. She stood outside in the street and loudly lamented for all to hear: “Let the neighborhood now come and see. Does he belong to a house? Is it my fault?” The powerful combination of symbols of pollution and the woman’s voice as lament, forced open a public space in which her plight had to be received… Ironically, in this case it was not the mother crying out for revenge because the enemy had harmed her child but because the child is the enemy. Once earlier relating her story to me, Swapan’s mother had said to me, “I pray to god-oh god, lift him up to yourself-can anyone imagine such words, wrenched out of a mother, words asking for the death of the same son to whom she had given shelter in the womb, borne him in pain? He has made his mother into a dayan [female monster].”

This page describes the unfolding of a case of mental illness in a young man living in a slum in Delhi (India). The center of gravity in this discussion is not on the clinic and on the exclusion of the mad in asylums, but on the network of relations (human and nonhuman) within which madness is encountered, acquires shape and is lived. The book asks who is the subject of illness? It proposes that illness might be seen not as located in the body of the individual but in the family circumstances, medical markets, state provisioning , and singular lives, as it (the illness) moves between times of normalization and times of critical pathology. Given the incoherences that illness produces in these relations the book goes on to ask, How should we understand the ontology of disease and of cure?

The scene of health care among the urban poor in India is of a proliferation of practitioners from different streams of medicine, of the neglect of patients in public hospitals and clinics and of medical markets within which the poor diagnostic skills, aggressive marketing of pharmaceuticals, and a combination of high rhetoric of policy makers with complete indifference to the actual plight of patients, has led to a crisis in the quality of care that the poor receive. Paying close attention to how practitioners imagine their craft – and the knotting of the complex worlds of patients and healers, the book asks how new norms of living are continuously generated within this scene of illness and care. At once a tender and intimate account of the conditions in which small events of illness might morph into major catastrophes for the poor and a stringent criticism of self-congratulatory discourses of global health, the book seeks to unsettle the ease with which scholars and policy makers pronounce on the characteristics of health care for the poor from a comfortable distance. A closer look based on immersion in these lives, leads us away from either a nostalgic rendering of the poor or a paternalistic viewpoint from above that assumes that the expert knows best. The stance of the poor in face of such everyday crises might be best described as that of “ordinary realism” in which the anthropologist too participates as she navigates these complex worlds.

Learn more about Affliction at the Fordham University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea R. Jain's "Selling Yoga"

Andrea R. Jain is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Selling Yoga is concerned with the misguided tendency to reduce modern postural yoga, a variety of modern regimens consisting of postures synchronized with breathing, to a mere commodity of global market capitalism. Page 99’s concern is key to one of the major arguments of Selling Yoga. The book suggests modern yoga transformed from a countercultural phenomenon to a part of pop culture when entrepreneurs succeeded in “selling yoga” by establishing continuity between postural yoga brands and the dominant trends of late-twentieth-century transnational consumer culture. Selling Yoga evaluates exempla from postural yoga in a way that takes insider perspectives seriously in order to demonstrate that popularized yoga, though a product of consumer culture, is not a mere commodity, but can also serve as a body of religious practice.

From page 99:

One response to postural yoga has been to ignore emic accounts (accounts from the perspectives of those who live inside the relevant body of practice, accepting its basic worldview, rituals, and values) and to instead analyze postural yoga based exclusively on etic accounts (accounts from where people live outside the relevant body of practice)...

... some exclusively etic accounts of postural yoga amount to broadly targeted refusals to take it seriously as a body of religious practice, since, from their perspectives, it can be reduced to impotent borrowings from ancient yoga traditions put in service to capitalist values. According to such thinkers, postural yoga represents a mere commodification that exploits or distracts from what is perceived as the ancient, traditional, and homogonous yoga tradition.

Accomplished yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein, for example, refused to seriously analyze postural yoga as a body of religious practice. He considered ‘the popularization of yoga as potentially destructive of the yogic heritage’ since it embodies ‘distortions’ of yoga (Feuerstein 2003).

These accounts and claims are seriously misguided. First, they rely on historically inaccurate visions of yoga, which has always been dynamic, hence the abundant divergences between even premodern yoga traditions and the concomitant absence of a single, homogenous yoga heritage. Second, though there is no doubt that many of the ways in which yoga marketers sell products reflect continuity with consumer culture, and many yoga insiders approach yoga as a consumer good in service to capitalist values, such as profit, postural yoga can also serve as a body of religious practice in the sense of a set of behaviors that are treated as sacred, as set apart from ordinary life; that are grounded in a shared worldview; that are grounded in a shared set of values or goals concerned with resolving weakness, suffering, or death; and that are reinforced through narrative and ritual.

Postural yoga has robust religious qualities when, for example, insiders put yoga commodities in service to aims ranging from moral improvement to self-perfection, approach the yoga class as a healing space set apart from the mundane dimensions of life, or repeat a rich mythology on the transmission of yogic knowledge across generations to their teacher, perhaps one of the postural yoga giants B. K. S. Iyengar or Bikram Choudhury, before finally reaching and transforming them in a local yoga studio on a rubber mat.

Learn more about Selling Yoga at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greg Garrett's "Entertaining Judgment"

Greg Garrett, the 2013 Centennial Professor at Baylor University, is the author of twenty books of nonfiction, memoir, and fiction. His latest book is Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination, which explores the stories we tell about death and the afterlife--and why we tell them.

BBC Radio has called Garrett "one of America's leading voices on religion and culture," and he has also written on such topics as spirituality and suffering, film, U2, Harry Potter, and the boom in superhero narratives.

Garrett applied the “Page 99 Test” to Entertaining Judgment and reported the following:

This turns out to be a useful exercise: Page 99 of Entertaining Judgment actually offers a pretty representative picture of what the book is trying to accomplish. Entertaining Judgment argues that much of what we know or think we know about death (and what follows) is a product of the human imagination. Page 99 is smack in the middle of my chapter on human imaginings of Heaven. In the chapter as a whole, I’m discussing literature, music, movies, art, and other forms of culture—as well as Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim holy texts—to see how human beings have tried to envision a positive form of afterlife.

Page 99 gives you a nice snapshot of the larger book, which takes on huge concepts by analyzing specific presentations of these abstract ideas across the centuries. In this particular photo, let’s imagine that you see parts of two bodies. Page 99 finds us at the end of a section exploring the heavenly archetype “Paradise.” On previous pages, I’ve been discussing how the idea of a place of joy and beauty distinct from our current existence gets developed in texts from The Grapes of Wrath to the cult classic Big Night (set in a failing restaurant called “Paradise”) to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

As the page opens, I’m finishing a close reading of Coldplay’s Grammy-nominated song “Paradise” and its bizarre but charming music video. Then I jump into another archetype of Heaven, “Elysium,” opening with this beautiful quotation from Homer’s The Odyssey and moving on to Shakespeare, Mozart, Tolkien, and the movies Gladiator and (natch) Elysium.

I do love me some Ford Madox Ford, and it turns out he’s mostly right about how the Page 99 project applies to Entertaining Judgment. Maybe no single page of my book could reveal the way I’m developing arguments about Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and our current fascination with the undead, but Page 99 does at least show you the breadth of the texts I’m exploring to do it, and that makes it a snapshot worth keeping.

From page 99:

The lyrics [of “Paradise”] however, can take us only part of the way to Paradise. At several points, the song offers only “ooos” and soaring “Ohs,” since no words can properly capture the ineffable reality of the world beyond. The video for the song presents the idea of moving from an unsatisfactory reality to—or back to—a place of beauty and joy. The narrative in the video is bizarre but serviceable: an “elephant” (lead singer Chris Martin wearing an elephant costume) escapes from a dingy cell-like zoo cage (filmed, interestingly, at Paradise Wildlife Park, north of London), and makes his way to South Africa via bike, Tube, plane, and unicycle. At last, he meets up with the other members of Coldplay—also in elephant suits—and together they play the chorus and “ohs” against the beautiful backdrop of the setting African sun, until the scene suddenly shifts to the band onstage—still wearing their elephant heads. The brightly-colored stage set continues the motif and ties the idea of Paradise now to the band’s performance and the audience’s enjoyment of it. They have all entered—or returned to—some place where the cares of this world can be set aside, if only for the length of a song.

Heaven is not simply for moderns, of course; the Greeks spoke of a land called Elysium or the Elysian Fields in which the heroic, the faithful, and those related to the gods would live after death, enjoying the good life—or an even better one. In The Odyssey, Book Four, the god-prophet Proteus tells Menelaus, King of Sparta, about his ultimate fate:

…It’s not for you to die

and meet your fate in the stallion-land of Argos,

no, the deathless ones will sweep you off to the world’s end,

the Elysian Fields, where gold-haired Rhadamanthys waits,

here life glides on in immortal ease for mortal man;

no snow, no winter onslaught, never a downpour there

but night and day the Ocean River sends up breezes,

singing winds of the West refreshing all mankind.

All this because you are Helen’s husband now—

The gods count you the son-in-law of Zeus.

Learn more about Entertaining Judgment at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: Greg Garrett.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness' "Appealing to Justice"

Kitty Calavita is Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society and of Sociology at UC Irvine. Her books include Invitation to Law and Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law; Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe; Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis; and Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS.

Valerie Jenness is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and of Sociology at UC Irvine, where she is also Dean of the School of Social Ecology. Her books include Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement Practice; Hate Crimes: New Social Movements and the Politics of Violence; Making It Work: The Prostitutes' Rights Movement in Perspective; and Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic, and reported the following:

Most of page 99 is taken up by a table that describes the characteristics of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) personnel we interviewed. Below that is the continuation of a paragraph that began on p. 98:

…almost everyone spoke positively of the legitimacy of the appeals process and prisoners’ right to file grievances. This commentary did not appear to be offered merely for the sake of political correctness, but was often voiced with, if not passion, then at least conviction. Henry Lopez, an official in the Inmate Appeals Branch (IAB), was among the most adamant: “This is a way of giving voice to people it matters to….We need to ensure they get a voice.”

Henry Lopez (pseudonym) is an inmate appeals official in the Sacramento CDCR office that provides the final level of appeal to prisoners who have gone through an administrative process to contest the conditions of their confinement--a process that is required by law before prisoners can file a federal lawsuit. Although few prisoners prevail, tens of thousands of such appeals are filed annually in California alone. Appealing to Justice is an examination of that process, and a rare look inside prison, one of the most closed and invisible institutions in American society. We gained unique access to a computer-generated random sample of approximately 500 prisoner grievances filed in California in 2005-2006, and received unprecedented permission to interview a random sample of 120 CDCR prisoners in three prisons for men, as well as 23 key CDCR personnel. What these grievances and conversations tell us about prison conditions and about the nature of disputing in such an asymmetrical context is illuminating, and sometimes shocking. Our most intriguing findings, however, relate to the multidimensional nature of prisoners’ and officials’ perceptions, which in turn speaks to the complex quality of prison as a contemporary American institution. As Henry Lopez reveals in the quote above, he strongly believes in prisoners’ right to appeal their conditions, “giving voice to people it matters to…” We were told some version of this by all the officials we interviewed. But, these same officials also (and seamlessly) spoke with hostility about prisoners who file grievances, calling them “narcissists,” “liars”, and “whiners” who are overly “entitled.” Apparent contradictions such as these appeared over and over again in our interviews with officials. Prisoners too articulated disconnects, disdaining the grievance system as a “joke” but continuing to use it, and speaking reverently about “the law” and “evidence” as valid arbitrators of truth and fairness. Such contradictions parallel almost precisely what are arguably two defining logics of our age: The emphasis on individual rights on one hand, and the culture of control on the other. We argue in Appealing to Justice that prisons sit at the fault line of these colliding logics, and surface in the contradictory narratives of both prisoners and their captors. In addition to making these empirical and theoretical points, the importance of Appealing to Justice lies in its “giving voice to people it matters to” —those who live and work in prison, and from whom we almost never hear.

Learn more about Appealing to Justice at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Edward Terrell's "A Talent for Friendship"

John Edward Terrell has long been recognized as one of the world's leading experts on the peopling of the Oceania and the remarkable biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity of modern Pacific Islanders. He is also a pioneer in the study of global human biogeography, baseline probability analysis, and the application of social network analysis in archaeology and anthropology. Since 1971 he has been the curator of Oceanic archaeology and ethnology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago where he now holds the endowed Regenstein Curatorship of Pacific Anthropology established there in 2005.

Terrell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Talent for Friendship: Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait, and reported the following:

The “Page 99” test takes us almost to the end of Chapter 13 titled “You can’t get there from here.” Each of the 30 chapters is by design short. Each is in a way a separate essay—again by design—on one facet of the many sides of the jewel that evolution fashioned when it created us as a species.

Chapter 13 explores the vexing stubbornness with which we often cling to commonsense beliefs about what it means to be human despite scientific evidence to the contrary. One likely reason for this pigheadedness is that while science and common sense are alike grounded in human experience, the simplicity of most commonsense explanations can make it hard to win people over to the complexity and uncertainties of most scientific arguments.

This chapter explores the famous case of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). For much of history, one of the great mysteries of life was why certain stars do not stay put like all the others in the sky. For centuries, making accurate predictions about where these wandering stars would be on any given night was anything but a piece of cake. The irony is that the calculations involved were so challenging because everyone was accepting as the gospel truth the mistaken but utterly commonsense idea that the earth sits motionless at the center of the universe while the sun, moon, and planets move around us. And as I further observe on page 99:

I think it is sobering to know that both common sense and good practical (and scientific) reasoning in the 16th century spoke unequivocally against Copernicus and strongly in favor of the old Ptolemaic view of the universe—a point of view that we now know was not just a little wrong, but was completely, utterly wrong. A lesser known fact is that for years after Copernicus’s death in 1543, some of the world’s leading astronomers did their very best to salvage the older world view—efforts that went to the extreme of offering elaborate blends of the old and the new that kept the earth right there in the center of things where it clearly belonged while allowing some of the planets to go around the sun the way Copernicus wanted them to.

The point of my telling this story is a basic one. Regardless of how sensible and widely believed something seems to be does not make it true. This moral definitely applies also to what philosophers and scientists have all too often said about human nature. However logical and persuasive the claims made by men such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Pufendorf, Spencer, Boas, and others may still sound to many of us today, what they wrote shows us that when it comes to human nature, like Ptolemy, we can easily start off on the wrong foot.

Mentioning here Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others is my way of alluding to what I had earlier written about in the book. These Enlightenment thinkers in the 17th and 18th century and others more recently, as well, argued in ways that have led many of us to believe that the individual is the basic measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Science is now showing us, however, that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the self-serving individual. Evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others. Or, to say it as I had said it back on page 17 in Chapter 3:

Our evolved ability, our psychological and biological capacity, to make friends even with strangers is a defining characteristic of our species, an evolved human trait marking us apart from most other species on earth just as surely as the other diagnostic traits that have been singled out as being characteristic of our kind, such as walking upright on two legs, having opposable thumbs and a prominent chin, and possessing the powers of both speech and complex abstract reasoning.

Learn more about A Talent for Friendship: Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait at the Oxford University Press website.

Cover story: A Talent for Friendship.

--Marshal Zeringue

Holger Nehring's "Politics of Security"

Holger Nehring is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Politics of Security: British and West German Protest Movements and the Early Cold War, 1945-1970, and reported the following:

The test worked – and here is how. Let’s start with a large canvas and gradually zoom in to find the spot that marks p. 99. Politics of Security asks how we can understand the Cold War as a war in Europe, although no real battles were fought. This issue has puzzled me since I was a boy, growing up close to a Pershing II missile base in Mutlangen, Germany, in the 1980s, at the height of a series of contestations over peace and security.

Normally, wars are understood to be a suspension of politics or, in Clausewitz’s famous words, the ‘continuation of politics by other means’. The history of debates about nuclear weapons in Britain and West Germany from the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s to détente in the late 1960s suggests a different reading: the Cold War in Europe was fundamentally political and involved a debate about the very foundation of politics. In particular, the debates over the nuclear arms race mobilised different and historically specific notions of security that were embedded in historical experiences, memories and social communities. Activists tried to wrestle the fundamental plank of legitimacy from their governments: the control over the meanings of security.

By developing images and phantasies of a possible future nuclear war in light of experiences of the Second World War, activists made the abstract notion of the nuclear arms race comprehensible to broader audiences. The book demonstrates how these experiences came together and diverged again, how they were prompted and challenged by specific events; and it highlights both the broad similarities of British and West German activism and the differences in their specific meanings and resonance.

Page 99 is part of a chapter that analyses the ways in which discussions about nuclear weapons enabled different political and social communities, with their diverse experiences and memories, to discover common interests and concerns against the backdrop of specific political challenges. Activists drew on different pasts to imagine common political utopias. This particular section discusses the ways in which some West German and British Protestant Christians came to interpret the arms race as an issue of fundamental religious as well as political importance.

Defining security is a political act; definitions of security are not fixed; claims for security are – and should be – constantly contested.

Learn more about Politics of Security at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Avery Sutton's "American Apocalypse"

Matthew Avery Sutton is the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University. He is the author of Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), and Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007). He has published articles in diverse venues ranging from the Journal of American History to the New York Times and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Fulbright Commission, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, and reported the following:

If Page 99 is a test, my book earns a low pass. The page alludes to a few of the key issues in the book, but misses most of the most sexy material. Alas, neither the Battle of Armageddon, not the Antichrist appear on these pages.

In this book I am offering a reexamination of the rise and evolution of American fundamentalism. I argue that fundamentalists’ sincere conviction that they were living in the last days just before the rapture, rise of the Antichrist, and Second Coming of Christ influenced them in profound ways. The conviction that the end was nigh shaped everything from their politics to their economics to their family lives to their understanding of world events including depression and war.

Page 99 hints at some of this. It falls within a chapter on World War I and the ways in which white fundamentalists and African American evangelicals understood the war through the lens of biblical prophecy. Their religious convictions made them bad citizens—they believed that war was inevitable (hence the League of Nations was a futile dream) and that Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy was pointless. The political ramifications of what started as a theological debate led to a split in American Protestantism between liberals and conservatives that is with us to this day. I write:

Over the course of the war, premillennialists and postmillennialists waged a battle of pens, typewriters, tracts, and books, taking no prisoners. The war highlighted and exaggerated their differences, propelling the controversy forward. By the time Woodrow Wilson returned from treaty negotiations in France, Protestant leaders knew that a major schism was in the works. How it would end nobody knew. Recognizing that the future of American Protestantism was at stake, neither side sought an armistice.

From there, I transition to the next section of this chapter:

The publication of the Fundamentals and the ensuing war time controversy with modernists helped radical evangelicals sharpen their faith. But they understood that more work had to be done to establish a lasting movement.

The war gave them the impetus to build an identifiable movement, one that they soon called fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, in turn gave rise to Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and the rise of modern American evangelicalism, which has shaped the course of American history in profound ways.

Learn more about American Apocalypse at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Petropoulos's "Artists Under Hitler"

Jonathan Petropoulos is John V. Croul Professor of European History, Claremont McKenna College, and author of several books on culture in the Third Reich. He is former Research Director for Art and Cultural Property, Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.

Petropoulos applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany, and reported the following:

Well, it’s difficult for me to assess the quality of my own work (although not surprisingly, I believe I did a good job, having spent nine years researching and writing this tome), but I think page 99 is representative of the book as a whole. The page falls in the chapter on Paul Hindemith, the modernist composer who tried to find accommodation with the Nazi regime (but failed—as did the other cultural figures taken up in this section).

Page 99 engages many of the themes in the book: the defense of a modernist composer on ideological grounds (in this case by Wilhelm Furtwängler, who called Hindemith “purely Germanic”), the strong popular support expressed for these progressive artists during the Third Reich (audiences applauded for twenty minutes after Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted at the Berlin State Opera, although the reaction came because Furtwängler had defended Hindemith in a prominent German newspaper); and the active engagement of Nazi leaders in the formulation of state cultural policy. One of the great paradoxes of the Third Reich is that the Nazi leaders—the most barbarous and malevolent men in history—devoted so much time to cultural pursuits. They not only collected art, but were very hands-on in making cultural policy.

This page is representative of the book in other ways too. First, it is part of a case study approach. Because I seek to discern the motivations of these modernist cultural icons, it is important to examine the specifics of their lives. Every figure had his or her own reasons for seeking accommodation with the regime. Of course, they are comparable in many ways (hence the organization of the book, with one section on those who sought to find a place in the Reich and failed, and another about those who tried and succeeded). But it’s important to focus in on the specific thoughts and circumstances of these very complicated and accomplished artists.

I think this book is also representative because it shows that many modernist cultural figures continued to be productive during the Third Reich, and that is one of the arguments of my book. There is a myth that all Nazis were anti-modernist and that they prevented the creation of modern art between 1933 and 1945. That’s very far from the truth. Many modern artists not only continued to work, but enjoyed the most productive periods of their career. I’m not saying that it wasn’t difficult, but for many, the dangerous environment imparted a sense of meaning, even urgency, with regards to their work. The trade in modern artworks continued up until 1945—one could buy and sell works by Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, Franz Marc, or Käthe Kollwitz. It’s important that we develop a more nuanced understanding of the cultural life of Nazi Germany.

Learn more about Artists Under Hitler at the Yale University Press website.

Writers Read: Jonathan Petropoulos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee A. Farrow's "Alexis in America"

Lee A. Farrow is professor of history and distinguished teaching professor at Auburn University–Montgomery.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Alexis in America: A Russian Grand Duke's Tour, 1871-1872, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book, I begin the description of Alexis’s visit to Harvard University in the fall of 1871. Over a period of three months in 1871-1872, Grand Duke Alexis, son of Russian Tsar Alexander II, traveled all over the United States, visiting all the major American cities of the time (including Chicago right after the Great Fire) and meeting many famous Americans of the period, including Albert Bierstadt, Oliver Wendell Homes, Samuel Morse, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ulysses Grant. He also traveled by train for a buffalo hunt with Buffalo Bill and Custer and was present for the first daytime celebration of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. His visit occurred during the high point of Russian-American relations and the success of his visit was seen as a measure of the reliability of the Russian-American friendship. This is the first book to cover this fascinating story. Because I wanted any history lover to read it, I wrote it with a general audience in mind. In that sense, page 99 does represent the whole of the book. It discusses one of Alexis’s encounters with Americans and American life and, I hope, it is engaging for readers of all kinds.

Learn more about Alexis in America at the LSU Press website.

Writers Read: Lee A. Farrow.

My Book, The Movie: Alexis in America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Raanan Rein's "Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina"

Raanan Rein is Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina, and reported the following:

This book focuses on the history of the Club Atletico Atlanta, a soccer/football club located in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Villa Crespo. I consider soccer as a privileged avenue in Argentina for negotiating social, ethnic and gender identities. Although populated by many ethnic groups, Villa Crespo has long been considered, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as a Jewish neighborhood. Since the mid-20th century, Jews have constituted a substantial proportion of the fans, administrators and presidents of Atlanta, so much so that the fans of rival teams often chant anti-Semitic slogans during matches.

Page 99 begins a discussion about a critical stage in Argentine history, including the history of sports. The rise of a populist movement headed by the charismatic Juan Perón changed the rules of the political game to this day. The use and abuse of sports by the Perón regime influenced the history of Club Atlanta, as well as the relations of Jewish-Argentines with the government. The bond between Atlanta and Juan and Evita Perón started in 1944, when club members, many of them Jewish, donated money in order to assist the victims of the San Juan earthquake. They were part of a nationwide solidarity campaign headed by Juan Perón.

In the following years Atlanta, like many other soccer clubs, enjoyed financial support from the regime and paid back by expressing support of the government. The planned stadium of Atlanta was supposed to be named after Eva Perón. However, the military coup d'etat that deposed Perón in September 1955 also put an end to this plan. The new national authorities briefly closed the Villa Crespo stadium, a measure motivated by political consideration. The Jewish image of the neighborhood, and, by extension, of Club Atlanta, may have contributed to a certain attitude of suspicion and mistrust on the part of the new government. It was a time when nationalistic Catholic groups were distributing anti-Semitic pamphlets that included accusations against the Jews and the Masons of supposedly encouraging Perón to enter into a conflict with the Catholic Church.

The Jewish identity of Club Atlanta is similar to the one of Ajax Amsterdam and London's Tottenham Hotspur. The book thus discusses identity issues within and without the stadium and the cases in which identity is assumed by people or imposed on them.

Learn more about Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue