John Kenneth White's "Barack Obama's America"

John Kenneth White is Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Barack Obama's America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Barack Obama's America is late in a chapter titled "Redefining Relationships." On the page is a description of how the dissolution of marriage knows no political or cultural barriers. Indeed, divorce is more likely to occur in George W. Bush's Texas than in John Kerry's Massachusetts. Similarly, conservative Christians (particularly Baptists) are also more likely to divorce than atheists. Divorce, cohabitation, hookups, and same-sex relationships are part of a redefinition of the American family. Today one-third of families describe themselves as consisting of a "Mom, Dad, and kids." Meanwhile, every other version of the family predominates, including single moms and dads, grandparents, step moms or step dads, and significant others. In fact, when Americans are asked to describe their families, the most common (and apt) description is love.

The reformation of the American family is only one of several revolutions reshaping our society. Another is race. The white/black world of the 1960s is receding thanks to immigration and interracial marriages. By mid-century whites will be a minority throughout the U.S., and by 2030 Hispanics are estimated to constitute one-third of the population. That transformation has found its way into the electorate: in 2008, whites were the smallest proportion of the vote in history, and in the coming years their percentage of the voting population will slowly, but surely, decline. Add to this a gay rights revolution and a transformation of the ways in which Americans worship and you have the makings of a reshuffling of the extant political order.

The country that twice elected Ronald Reagan president has receded into history. Reagan himself left the political stage twenty years ago, and Republicans have been searching for a leader ever since. Meanwhile, Barack Obama's personal story is reflective of larger changes at work in American society. His victory in 2008 validates an old political rule: demography is destiny.

Learn more about Barack Obama's America at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Buntin's "L.A. Noir"

John Buntin writes about crime and urban affairs for Governing Magazine.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City, and reported the following:

Page 99 of L.A. Noir takes us deep into the mind of one of the book's two main figures, the mobster Mickey Cohen. The year is 1943. Mickey has been working as Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's muscle for nearly six years, helping Siegel slowly take control of the L.A. underworld. For the most part, it's been easy, pistol-whipping deadbeats with gaming debts, extorting money from cowering businessmen, and facing down local toughs. But Mickey's more recent work has made the diminutive hoodlum (who stood 5' 5" — in lifts) uncharacteristically nervous. Siegel's been "beefing" with the boys in Chicago, and even a headstrong young punk like Cohen knows how dangerous the Outfit can be. So Mickey decides to bail out — by joining the Army:

Mickey wasn't exactly a model candidate (though there was no denying his efficiency as a killer). So he decided to grease the skids. It just so happened that his old "Big brother," fight referee Abe Roth, was a former Army officer with considerable pull in high places. Cohen asked the silver-tongued Siegel (who, somewhat surprisingly, supported Mickey's decision to enlist) to give Roth, as Mickey put it, "all that anti-Nazi shit and stuff." Roth was amenable to Mickey's request. Even better, he had a connection who could ensure the Mickey's criminal background didn't raise any alarms. Mickey was delighted. Assured that "the fix was in," he headed to Boyle Heights to report to the neighborhood draft board.

"Lookit," he told the ladies manning the draft desk. "I want to get in the Army."

"What's your draft status?" he was was asked in reply.

"I ain't been home for some time," Mickey replied evasively. (In fact, he had recently been on the lam.) "What's the big fuss about?" he continued, still confident in his fix. "I want to get in the Army. I'm ready to get in right now. What do I gotta do?"

The woman behind the desk asked for his name and then vanished into a back office. She emerged with a file—"kind of laughing and smiling."

"You can't get into the Army." The woman was holding his file. She showed it to him and then explained what it contained. The draft board had designated him a 4-F — not qualified for service in the armed forces—on grounds of mental instability. This was embarrassing, to say the least. Rather than confess, he called his wife and informed her that he'd been made a general. Then he rushed out and purchased a $150 raincoat ("beautiful... tailored real good")— with epaulettes. He arrived home to find his spouse on the phone, calling everyone she knew and telling everyone, "He's in the Army! He's going away again."

It was, Mickey thought, a helluva good joke.

Meanwhile, Cohen's nemesis, William H. Parker, the man who would later create the Dragnet-era LAPD (and later still become a subject of great controversy for the role he played in the Watts riots), is shipping off to Sardinia, there to commence a military career that would eventually take him to the beaches of Normandy and beyond.

Read more about L.A. Noir at John Buntin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Belich's "Replenishing the Earth"

James Belich is professor of history at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. He previously held the inaugural Keith Sinclair Chair in History at the University of Auckland, and has held visiting positions at Cambridge, Melbourne, and Georgetown Universities. His earlier books, all award-winners, include a two volume general history of New Zealand, Making Peoples and Paradise Reforged, and The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, winner of the Trevor Reese Prize for an outstanding work of imperial or commonwealth history published in the preceding two years.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s Page 99 test does not work too well for my new book, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939. My Page 99 is of course mostly endnotes, which are no-one’s favourite reading. But they are necessary to back up the book’s sweeping new claims about the shaping of the modern world, particularly the English-speaking world. The Anglophones, I argue, were the prime beneficiaries of a forgotten “Settler Revolution”, which repopulated roughly half the world in the 19th century.

Ten pages back (oh for page 89, not page 99) you’ll find a summary of the form the settler revolution took, in a neat table. Twenty great ‘rounds’ of frontier boom and bust rollicked across America’s Great West and across Britain’s far-flung settler ‘wests’: Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. Ten pages forward (oh, for page 109, not 99) – you get a description of how old and new technologies worked alongside each other for a time to create revolutionary new means of mass transfer: of people, money, ideas, and status.

But Page 99 does have a few lines of text, perched above the endnotes, and they do hint at the broader thesis and the hard questions it tries to answer.

“We need to explain why settlement took off in 1815, before industrialization in general and steam transport in particular could provide much help. Just to make matters more difficult, we need to ensure that our explanation works for both British and American Wests, and possibly other ‘wests’ as well, in both the age of sail and the age of rail. Still worse, we have compatibly to explain not only the general take-off of 1815, but also the ongoing rounds of boom and bust. The next three chapters address these issues”.

Read more about Replenishing the Earth at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rick Grannis' "From the Ground Up"

Rick Grannis is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, From the Ground Up: Translating Geography into Community through Neighbor Networks, and reported the following:

On the one hand, page 99 is only a small part of an argument involving multi-staged neighboring relations, network influence theory, and the special role of children, an argument that accounts for where neighborhood communities come from, why certain effects (e.g. segregation, social capital, collective efficacy, etc.) bundle together in some neighborhoods and not in others, and why neighborhood communities often outlive the residents who comprise them.

On the other hand, page 99 is quite appropriately a neighborhood map. It’s not a map of a real-estate neighborhood or a school catchment or a census tract, however, but rather a map of how one resident understood her neighborhood. One of the activities conducted during the many data collections reported in this book asked people to draw maps of their neighborhoods and to locate neighbors they knew on these maps. This respondent’s map shows that, like thousands of others interviewed for this book, a small set of interconnected face blocks and intersections delimited how she cognitively understood her neighborhood.

In this way, page 99 nicely illustrates (literally) one of the central messages of the book: that residents’ understanding of their neighborhood communities are experientially based, constantly developing as they interact with and observe each other on the streets and walkways surrounding their residence.

These walking arenas guide the evolution of neighbor networks, formed by the passive transmission of norms and values, and thus constrain the neighborhood communities which emerge as a bi-product. Furthermore, walking arenas form substrates for neighborhood community networks, substrates which remain relatively stable even as the residents comprising them are constantly in flux.

Neighboring’s passive nature gives walking arenas this power. Residents didn’t typically go searching for specific others to become neighbors. They accepted whomever they met while living out their life along the streets in their neighborhood; or they didn’t. Either way, few went looking for neighbors. The only active choice most residents made about whom to interact with as neighbors involved choosing where to live in the first place.

In the end, perhaps the book’s most intriguing argument is that, in our age of cell phones, blogs, and twitter, when we can choose to become part of any electronic community we desire, some of the most important communities in our lives are relatively non-volitional. They are formed for us by the subtle geography of neighborhood streets.

Read an excerpt from From the Ground Up, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lawrence Glickman's "Buying Power"

Lawrence B. Glickman is professor of history at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Buying Power is atypical in a number of ways but it nonetheless illustrates the central thesis of the book. Two illustrations fill the top third of the page: one an advertisement from the Charleston Mercury in 1850 advertising luxury goods from New York and Philadelphia; the other an ad from South Carolina’s Yorkville Enquirer in late 1860 for a “Warm Secession Suit” manufactured in the “Southern Confederacy.” The text at the bottom third of the page discusses white Southern critiques of Northern materialism. “The licentious spirit of the North must be rebuked,” I quote one rabble rouser from the Barnwell district of South Carolina who was promoting Southern “non intercourse” with the North. The essence of this non intercourse movement, as I show in “Rebel Consumer,” the chapter of which p. 99 is a part, was a boycott of Northern goods that lasted from the 1820s through the onset of the Civil War. The non intercourse movement not only promoted a boycott of the North but encouraged Southern consumers to “buy Southern.”

Two things about the Southern non intercourse movement are significant for the broader argument of my book. First, one of the aims of my book is to show that consumer activism is not the exclusive province of the left. Throughout American history boycotts have been employed by groups across the political spectrum. Indeed, this chapter on Southern boycotts of the North is paired with a chapter on abolitionist boycotts of slave-made goods. Second, this movement illustrates a tension that punctuates the entire history of consumer activism, namely the seemingly contradictory simultaneous suspicion of consumption alongside the employment of consumerist tactics. The main goal of the white Southern boycotters of the North was to “rebuke” Northern materialism by stoking Southern consumerism.

The two advertisements on p. 99 illustrate other tensions. The ad for Northern luxury goods revealed that calls for the boycott were not universally heeded. The Mercury was the newspaper of the Southern firebrands and a leading advocate of the boycott. The fact that its pages were filled with such ads demonstrated that not all Southern consumers supported the boycott, which helps explain why this campaign, like most of the boycotts I examine in the book, failed to achieve their objectives.

Learn more about Buying Power at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Burnett's "Undiscovered Gyrl"

Allison Burnett is a screenwriter, journalist, poet, director, and novelist and short story writer.

His novels include Christopher: A Tale of Seduction, a finalist for the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction, and The House Beautiful: A Novel of High Ideals, Low Morals, and Lower Rent.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new novel, Undiscovered Gyrl, and reported the following:

I think both page 69 and page 99 of Undiscovered Gyrl are vivid proof of Ford Madox Ford’s maxim, but I have selected page 99 to discuss. Here our teenage blogger protagonist, Katie Kampenfelt, is brutally frank in her depiction of sex’s aftermath, as well as realistically proud of her own assets (pun intended.) We learn that she is reckless when it comes to birth control, and liberal when it comes to statutory rape. We learn also that her lover reminds Katie of an angry parent, and that Katie is the sort of girl who smuggles beer into her school locker. And yet we must admire that at her tender age Katie is intuitive enough to know what is coming and canny enough to dissemble at a moment’s notice. What makes the book a page turner, for those who describe it as such, is the character of Katie. They simply cannot get enough of her -- even when they want to strangle her. In this page we are given a generous helping of some of her most beguiling and most maddening qualities.

We laid there kissing and breathing until I felt some dribbling and excused myself. I walked slowly to the bathroom because I didn’t want to leak on the floor and because I wanted him to get a good look at my ass. I read once in one of my mom’s Cosmo magazines that a good trick is to hold an open hand across your ass like a fan and sort of skip all the way to the john, so the guy won’t see your cellulite.. Since I don’t have any I walked slowly with no hand.

When I came out of the bathroom Dan had his jeans back on and looked really freaked out.

“I wish that hadn’t happened,” he said.

“You mean no condom? Don’t worry. My period ended this morning.”

“No, I meant--”

“Oh, you mean jail? Don’t worry. I turn 18 in a few hours. I’m basically legal.”

“Sit down, Katie..”

I hated the serious look on his face. It was the kind your mom gives you when she got a call from the principal’s office about the beer they found in your locker. It was not the look you want from a person five minutes after you make love for the first time.

“Here’s the thing. I like you, Katie. A lot but--”

I knew what he was about to say. My heart stopped. But I pretended to be really calm.

“Listen, before you dump me, let me just say something,

Read an excerpt from the novel, and visit the Undiscovered Gyrl website and Allison Burnett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jim Noles' "Mighty by Sacrifice"

James L. “Jim” Noles, Jr., is a partner in the Environmental & Natural Resources Section of former Army officer, he is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the University of Texas School of Law. To date, his books have covered a variety of non-fiction subjects and his Balch & Bingham, LLP, in Birmingham, Alabama. An Army brat and articles have appeared in such diverse publications as the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Smithsonian Air & Space, Preservation, Urban Land, Continental, Thicket, Portico, Executive Traveler, Alabama Heritage, Mental Floss, America’s Civil War, and the Birmingham News.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mighty by Sacrifice: The Destruction of an American Bomber Squadron, August 29, 1944, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Mighty by Sacrifice literally and figuratively drops the reader into the blue waters of the Adriatic Sea. At that point in the narrative, Ed Smith, formerly a freshman at Ohio's Miami University and now a navigator in the U.S. Army Air Forces, is forced to bail out of his burning B-17 Flying Fortress after a raid on Ploesti, Romania.

"By the time he hit the water, everything seemed to go wrong -- an unsurprising outcome in light of the minimal parachute training aviators such as Smith had received. Still affixed to his harness, he found himself being pulled backward through the water as the chute sailed in the wind."

Smith eventually managed to free himself of his parachute, only to find himself weighed down by his heavy flight suit and boots while he struggled to inflate his Mae West life vest -- a task made difficult by the fact that the valves on the vest were open. Fortunately, he managed to shed his heavy flight gear while treading water in the gentle swells and to inflate the vest. Equally fortunately, other bombers in the formation reported his location and, within a few hours, a PBY Catalina search and rescue plane landed to pluck Smith and the other six survivors from the water. Three of their comrades were not so lucky.

So does page 99 capture the essence of Mighty by Sacrifice? Absolutely (thank goodness). The intent of the book is to tell the story of the Allies' Combined Bomber Offensive during World War II through the prism of the microcosmic experiences of one particular squadron and its aviators on one particular climatic mission. Page 99 offers such a view. Smith's story is a personal one, but it provides a glimpse at the larger risks these aviators faced and, in this particular instance, how the air-sea rescue teams worked to alleviate those risks to the limited amount that they could.

Learn more about the book and author at Jim Noles' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Bergin's "Church, Society, and Religious Change in France"

Joseph Bergin is professor of history at the University of Manchester, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Cardinal Richelieu, The Making of the French Episcopate and Crown, Church and Episcopate under Louis XIV.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Church, Society, and Religious Change in France, 1580-1730, and reported the following:

The seventeenth-century French church took the post-Reformation process of reform and religious innovation much further than any other part of Catholic Europe. But after the ravages of the wars of religion the obstacles were numerous and formidable, and nowhere more than among the religious orders inherited from the Middle Ages, the subject of Page 99. France was home to some of Europe’s greatest monastic orders (e.g. the Benedictines, Cistercians), whose influence outside of France was of great importance to both the French monarchy and the French church. But these orders also belonged to the age-old benefice system inherited from earlier centuries, one which the monarchy as well as the social and ecclesiastical elites had powerful vested interests in preserving. Such interests were a major obstacle to successful reform among the orders, yet such reforms did materialise during the seventeenth century, notably among the Cistercians. One of their most celebrated reformers was Abbot Rancé of La Trappe, a well-born cleric who experienced a personal conversion in the early 1660s and who subsequently reformed La Trappe itself. But having reformed his abbey, he refused the usual and expected role of leader of a reform movement, but settled instead for that of a mentor and spiritual writer of wide-ranging influence. This case-study suggests how slow-burning a process the reform of French Catholicism in general was, yet by the early eighteenth century, many of the educated elites of Catholic Europe regarded it as the model to follow. My book offers an in-depth analysis and explanation of this unlikely transformation.

Learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

Read about Joseph Bergin's teaching and research at his University of Manchester faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

David B. Williams' "Stories in Stone"

David B. Williams is the author of The Seattle Street-Smart Naturalist and A Naturalist's Guide to Canyon Country. He has written for Smithsonian, Popular Mechanics, and National Wildlife, and is a regular contributor to Earth.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Stories in Stone: Travels through Urban Geology, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology occurs near the middle of a chapter titled, The Clam that Changed the World. After inhabiting Florida for over a century, the Spanish are building a fort, their tenth, out of stone. Like the other nine chapters in the book, The Clam tells the story of one type of stone and weaves together natural and cultural history to show how it was used as a building material. The page 99 stone is known as coquina, which is made of billions and billions of bivalves, including the world-altering clam.

Neither well-compacted nor well-cemented, coquina has the consistency of a Rice Krispy treat or a granola bar with shells and shell fragments replacing the oats. And yet, it made a wonderful building material in late 1600s Florida. On page 99, the Spanish colonists in St. Augustine have finally gotten permission, money, and craftsmen from Spain to build what would become known as the Castillo de San Marcos.

The castillo had its first test in 1702 when the British attacked. Over the next 40 days, they pummeled the fort with cannons but discovered that instead of breaking or cracking when hit by cannon shells, the cavity-rich coquina absorbed or deflected the iron projectiles. The British ultimately retreated. They tried another attack 38 years later, which also failed because of the unusual properties of coquina. Except for 20 years, the Spanish retained Florida into the nineteenth century, all because of the clams.

Throughout Stories in Stone, I wanted to combine history, science, personal observation, humor, interviews, and architecture. Page 99 showcases many of these aspects of the book. And, if you want to read the other 249 pages, you will find discussions of the brownstones of New York, a petrified wood gas station in Colorado, the great poet Robinson Jeffers’ home of granite boulders, the travertine of the Getty Center, and a 3.5-billion-year old, pink and black gneiss from Minnesota. All combine to show that interesting stories of natural history are just around the corner, if we take the time to look, to ask questions, and to wonder about the world.

Read descriptions of Stories in Stone's ten chapters, and learn more about the author and his work at David B. Williams' website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Kurlander's "Living With Hitler"

Eric Kurlander is associate professor of history at Stetson University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Living with Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich, and reported the following:

Nearly every new book on the Third Reich presumes one basic question: how could the heirs to Kant, Beethoven, and Einstein support Adolf Hitler? How could so many educated, “liberal”-minded Germans be complicit in the twentieth century’s most terrible crimes? Page 99 of Living With Hitler speaks to this question, which lies at the heart of my new book. On page 99 we find one of Germany’s leading liberal feminists and social progressives pulling no punches, criticizing the Third Reich’s discrimination against women in terms of equal opportunity in higher education, hiring, and pay. Particularly interesting is her call for employers “to offer the possibility of half- and part-time jobs … so women who needed extra income might still balance their work and family life for offering flexible working hours.”

The fact remains, however, that Bäumer and her liberal colleagues wanted women to become more involved in the war effort, an endorsement of Hitler’s foreign policy that drew the ire of Allied authorities. At the same time, Bäumer and company argued that discriminating against women in education and employment would undermine the strength of German science, economy, and society. That such participation would help perpetuate, not undermine, the regime goes without saying. Thus, for all their progressive convictions, Bäumer and her colleagues embraced central tenets of the Nazi worldview, from a more socially egalitarian racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) to the aggressive restoration of Germany’s great power status.

In short, page 99 articulates rather well three of the four main claims of the book. First, that there were clear ideological continuities between German left liberalism and National Socialism that made political accommodation more attractive than one might expect. Second, that these affinities were not necessarily reactionary, but sometimes “progressive” in nature. Whether one is discussing the Nazi attitude towards science and technology, the separation of church and state, social welfare, industrial organization, even women and the family, there were more than passing affinities between liberal and Nazi programs. Third, page 99 reflects the ample space for liberal criticism and everyday opposition in the Third Reich, especially before the outbreak of the Second World War. When liberals like Bäumer failed to resist, at least intellectually, it had less to do with fear of arrest than a tacit desire to accommodate specific policies.

What page 99 does not reveal is that most liberal democrats who acquiesced in some aspects of the Nazi “revolution” eventually rejected it because of their individual experience of National Socialism. There were various points at which liberals, confronted by the abject criminality of the regime, reëvaluated their position and turned away from even a tentative endorsement of Nazi policies. It may seem remarkable that liberals rationalized and even defended elements of Hitler’s foreign and domestic policy after 1933. But rather than dismiss their ambivalence as a sign of German peculiarity vis-à-vis the “West,” we should take it as a warning of the susceptibility of liberal democracy to fascism, particularly in times of economic distress and political chaos.

Learn more about Living With Hitler at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue