Louis Mendoza’s "A Journey Around Our America"

Louis G. Mendoza is a professor and Chair of the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, as well as an Associate Vice Provost in the Office for Equity and Diversity at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author and editor of numerous essays and several books, including, Conversations Across our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States, raúlrsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon is My Pen, and Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, A Journey Around Our America: A Memoir on Cycling, Immigration, and the Latinoization of the U. S., and reported the following:

A Journey Around Our America chronicles the almost six months I spent riding through 34 states around the perimeter of the country from July through December 2007. I took this trip as on a research sabbatical from the University of Minnesota as a non-traditional scholarly approach to investigate how Latinos are changing the country’s cultural geography through demographic change, with recent immigration being only one factor driving this transformation. My primary goal was to listen and learn. I published a collection of interviews I conducted along the way. This book is the trip from my perspective and all the adventures I had along the way.

On the 99th page of A Journey Around Our America, I am writing about my time in Iowa City. It’s my third day back on the road after taking a 10 day hiatus at my home in Minneapolis where I rested after the first segment of my trip was completed in late August. I am visiting friends in Iowa City and I see the news about the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. On page 99 I reflect on this and talk about several conversations I have with locals, a labor education specialist, entrepreneurs, and a small town city councilman. In many respects, this page is indicative of the book as a whole as I muse on Latinos in the news and gain insight from new people I met who are at different stations in life but who are critically aware of how changing demographics in the region (the Midwest in this case), are obliging people to adjust their perceptions of Latinos.

On Monday morning we watch the news coverage on Alberto Gonzales' resignation as U.S. Attorney General as a result of accusations of perjury before Congress. Gonzales had been the highest ranking Hispanic public official in the country. He was involved in several controversies in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, including his approval in 2002 of a memorandum that called the limitations on the questioning of prisoners under the Geneva Convention "obsolete" when dealing with terrorism, his August 2007 testimony regarding unauthorized government surveillance programs, and his confusing accounts of having approved the dismissals of nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006 while denying detailed knowledge of the circumstances or reasons. Hearings on the firings led to the controversy that ended in his resignation, though he was later exonerated.

We listened to his statement in horror as he speaks of how much he loves this country and that even his worst days in office (presumably the more recent ones when he's been under scrutiny for misleading Congress) are better than his father's best days in Mexico. I hope his father and others explain to him how insulting that statement is. His scheduled departure date of Sept. 16th will give new meaning to Mexican independence--or should I say, our freedom from this tyrannical Mexican American? To be sure, many saw in Gonzalez a shining example of American meritocracy in which an ethnic minority member could rise to the highest ranks of power. However, for many progressive-minded Latin@s, Gonzalez has represented the limits of access to power unless one is willing to mimic the tactics and values of the ruling elite.

Iowa City and West Liberty

The following day, Omar takes the day off to show me around Iowa City and surrounding communities. I have a great meeting with Ángel González, a program coordinator with the University of Iowa's Labor Center, we visit La Reyna, a small store and restaurant in the area and speak briefly with one of the co-owners and hear a little about how she started her business. She and her husband moved from Chicago so her children would not have to attend public schools there. I am fascinated with how new immigrants are able to open new businesses and they trade stories of how this is achieved through the pooling of money. Omar makes the point that would become more and more clear to me throughout my trip, that new immigrants of any background often take business risks here because their chance for mobility and entrepreneurial success are greater here than in their home countries. Omar arranges a meeting for me the next day with José Elizondo, the first Latin@ city council person elected in the town of W. Liberty, which is about 20 miles east of Iowa City.

Learn more about A Journey Around Our America at the University of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Jensen Wallach's "Well Met"

Jennifer Jensen Wallach is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas who specializes in African-American history and United States food history. She is the author of Closer to the Truth than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow (2008), Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen (2010), and the co-editor of Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas (2011). She is also the author of How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture (2012) and is the series editor of the University of Arkansas Press Series on Food and Foodways. In collaboration with Lindsey R. Swindall, she is also at work on two edited food history collections titled American Appetites: A Documentary Reader and High and Low on the Hog: African-American Foodways from Slavery to Obama. In 2010 History News Network named her a “Top Young Historian.”

Wallach applied the “Page 99 Test” to How America Eats and reported the following:

I would rather that readers ignore the old adage and judge my book by its playful and artfully designed cover rather than on the basis of page 99. Out of curiosity, I applied the test to a number of the novels on my bookshelves, and they all passed handily. Each page 99 captured something of the author’s style and essence as a thinker and writer. However, the same practice is more haphazard when applied to works of non-fiction. Novelists have creative control over how they shape the fictional worlds their characters inhabit while historians, like myself, owe fidelity to the real word. Sometimes that obligation to an externally existing historical reality makes for dull reading. For example, look at this passage from page 99 of How America Eats:

Refrigeration technology became increasingly more effective decade by decade, but the necessary equipment and infrastructure remained expensive. Just as improvements in wheat milling were too costly for small millers to install, refrigeration equipment too was affordable only to major meat packers. By 1890, four companies packed 89 percent of the country’s beef. Year by year, the American food supply was controlled by fewer and fewer corporations.

If the entire book read like that I would certainly crush my editors’ hopes that I have written a book that will prove enticing to hard to please undergraduate readers, to the discerning “general reader,” and to the historical community. The book surveys United States food history from the time of European contact through the present. I investigate how Americans have used food practices as a way to perform religious, gendered, racial, and political identities. All of these categories are subsumed under the larger question of what it means to be an “American.” A partial answer is manifested in how inhabitants of the United States have chosen to fill their stomachs. Technology is an important theme because many have taken pride in the country’s industrial prowess and technological innovation. As a result, Americans have generally shown a preference for inexpensive, industrially produced food over developing an artisan food culture. In order to show how this came about, I had to write about the technology that made this choice possible, even if that discussion does not make for riveting reading.

The discussion on page 99 is necessary and important but not representative of more nuanced and interpretive passages elsewhere in the book. My favorite chapter, “Food Habits and Racial Thinking,” examines the paradoxical fact that European American eaters have been willing to embrace the foods of members of various racial and ethnic groups but generally reluctant to bestow first class citizenship on the creators of these cuisines. That observation is more in keeping with my expertise and my approach to the subject than the rather technical contents of page 99.

Learn more about How America Eats at the Rowman & Littlefield website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Harold James's "Making the European Monetary Union"

Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. A specialist on German economic history and on globalization, his books include The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle and Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Making the European Monetary Union, and reported the following:

I was initially quite skeptical when I learned of the Page 99 Test, and wondered whether my page 99 was filled with peripheral technical details about the arcanae of monetary integration. But in fact, p. 99 is indeed a kind of microcosm of the book. It deals with two themes: the European response to the global monetary uncertainty that followed the closing of the gold window by President Nixon in August 1971; and the institutional maneuvering through which central bankers and the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements wanted to place themselves at the center of the European response. The BIS suggested that it should build up a permanent secretariat around the committee of European central bank governors that had been meeting in Basel.

Overall, the book tells the story of European monetary integration from the 1960s to the 1990s as a story of a European response to global monetary and financial turbulence. Some people believe that the Euro was driven by a fundamentally political logic (to make war in Europe impossible), and that the economic side was not well thought out: I lay out the basis for the economic and monetary thinking (and the way in which the technical experts guided and shaped that thinking) that drove the creation of the Euro.

Obviously, there are also themes that do not appear on this one page. A big obstacle to clear analysis of the Euro and its problems today lies in a propensity to develop myths about the origins of the single European currency. In one very powerful view the currency union was a high-minded European political project that ignored economic realities. It was needed to stop the recurrence of war between France and Germany. Both proponents of the Euro project such as the veteran German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher but also by opponents such as the economist Martin Feldstein have touted this theory. But it is implausible. Americans are perfectly aware that they haven’t had a war with Canada or Mexico recently (although in the long past there were indeed such conflicts), and that they don’t need a currency union to improve relations with neighbors.

The book shows how a political consensus alone was never enough, and how political initiatives only succeeded when they were underlined by a solid economic logic.

Learn more about Making the European Monetary Union at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Pierce's "The Last Walk"

Jessica Pierce has taught and written about philosophy for many years. She is the author of a number of books, including Morality Play: Case Studies in Ethics and The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Last Walk and reported the following:

Page 99 finds us in the middle of chapter 4, which is called “Pain.” Pain is a subject that could fill several Libraries of Congress; in my chapter, the agenda is to talk specifically about the pain experienced by animals—especially companion animals, with an eye toward how we can ensure that our pets don’t suffer at the end of life. One of the most important things we can to do improve animal welfare generally, and improve the lives of companion animals, is to pay careful attention to pain. Undertreated or untreated pain is epidemic among animals, even though good palliative care is available and relatively affordable. Still, although it is easy to agree that we should attend to pain in our animals, treating pain is tricky. Managing pain well takes determination and effort, and close collaboration between veterinarian and pet guardian.

By the time we reach page 99, I’ve set forth the scientific case for animal pain—and not just nociception (the physiological response to tissue damage), but the conscious perception of pain as an unpleasant emotional experience. You might think this point needs little in the way of proof, but you’d be surprised how much “pain skepticism” still pervades animal science. I’ve touched on which animals can experience pain: mammals, certainly, but also birds and fish and perhaps even some invertebrates (the jury is still out on lobsters and crabs). I’ve also talked about the difference between pain and the broader category of “suffering.” On page 99, I am in the middle of a discussion about how, exactly, we can begin to understand and measure pain in our companion animals, particularly if we take our own human experiences of pain as a starting point. I talk about “translational pain medicine,” which seeks to translate animal pain research, usually performed on rodents, into human clinical practices. And I explain that pain responses are highly individualized and will vary not just by species, but also by gender, age, past experiences, and personality.

The last paragraph of the page delves into somewhat more tentative speculations about pain in animals.

Although we might assume that the greater complexity of the human mind means that we will suffer more deeply from pain than other, less complex animals, this may not be true. Consider the following observations, from a scientist, a veterinarian, and a philosopher. Our scientist notes that the adrenal response to stress is more pronounced in animals than it is in people. Why? It may be because people can deal with stressful situations using psychological tools that animals lack—for example, we can understand why we’re being poked with a needle. Our veterinarian suggests that animals may suffer more severely from pain than people. Pain, he says, is divided into a sensory-discriminative dimension and a motivational-affective dimension, and since animals are more limited in the first dimension, they may have more pronounced reaction in the second dimension. And finally, our philosopher points out, “If animals are indeed… inexorably locked into what is happening now, we are all the more obliged to try to relieve their suffering, since they themselves cannot look forward to or anticipate its cessation, or even remember, however dimly, its absence... If they are in pain, their whole universe is pain; there is no horizon; they are their pain.”

Learn more about The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the Ends of Their Lives at Jessica Pierce's website and blog.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Jessica Pierce and Maya.

Writers Read: Jessica Pierce.

--Marshal Zeringue

Justin G. Wilford's "Sacred Subdivisions"

Justin G. Wilford has a PhD in cultural geography and an MA in political theory.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism and reported the following:

The “Page 99 Test” produced a positive result in the case of my book. The central argument of my book is that American evangelical megachurches are growing at a time when other Christian denominations are shrinking because they have rooted themselves on the post-suburban fringe of large metropolitan areas and have found a way to make these environments religiously meaningful. One of the key ways they do this is through the church’s self-initiated fragmentation and diffusion.

The most successful evangelical megachurches, like the one I focus on in my book—Saddleback Valley Community Church in Orange County, California—do not revolve around the central church campus, at least for their most devoted members. The religious practices and narratives that capture the hearts and imaginations of the churchgoers takes place in residential homes, scattered across the post-suburban landscape. On different week nights, Saddleback church members gather in groups of 5-15 in each others’ homes, and pray, share stories, and discuss various Christian readings or watch short christian videos. At Saddleback they simply call these gatherings “small groups,” while at other churches they have slightly more descriptive names such as, “home groups,” “community groups,” or “discipleship groups.” But generally their purpose is the same: to provide members with an individualized, intimate, and flexible mode of connecting their everyday lives with conservative evangelical narratives. The church, then, becomes as fragmented, mobile, and diffuse as its members’ post-suburban lives.

In older or less innovative forms of American Christianity, this fragmentation of the church into thousands of small groups, might be cause for concern. But for a church like Saddleback, it’s embraced. And this is how my page 99 begins:

“Who is the church?” and “Where is the church?” are not questions that a Saddleback pastor wants to answer with any certainty. In attempting to mirror its postsuburban environment, Saddleback refuses to draw growth boundaries, locate a dominant multifunctional center of activity, and enact strict regulation on what can and can not take place in given zones.

Learn more about the book and author at Justin G. Wilford's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laleh Khalili's "Time in the Shadows"

Laleh Khalili is a Reader in Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies and reported the following:

Page 99 is part of the conclusion of the chapter on Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and the legal struggles around the status of detainees there. When Camp X-Ray was first used to house detainees of the War on Terror we regularly heard that Guantánamo was a legal black hole. But what interested me was that the Camp was exactly the opposite. The vast edifice of laws, treaties, and court cases arguing its jurisdictional status loomed over the camp. But also what was really interesting to me was how much the discussion of Guantánamo as something monstrously new and unprecedented seemed amnesiac: what about the Haitian detainees held there in the mid-1990s, or all the other island prisons and detention centres used to hold combatants in small wars and counterinsurgencies over the course of the long 20th century?

On page 99, I sum up what I found most extraordinary about the mass of laws and legal arguments around Guantánamo: how all the cases revealed themselves for what they were via the precedents they invoked (colonial rulings, or cases which justified injustices). Page 99 mentions the Indian Wars, where many of the legal arguments of the War on Terror seem to have been rehearsed, including the usage of military commissions to summarily try non-citizens.

The book’s other chapters look at other forms of detention in the War on Terror, their ancestors from other wars, and the particular aspect of these liberal counterinsurgencies they reveal. So, extraordinary renditions, for example, tell us something about the use of proxies and local clients in these wars and the “plausible deniability” they grant the more powerful actor. Or the large-scale sweep of men between the ages of 16 and 55, and gigantic POW camps (such as those in Abu Ghraib, Camp Nama, or Bagram Air Force Base) reveal the vast apparatuses of information-gathering, bureaucracy, and re-education –alongside torture– used to “turn” suspected combatants. I also write about the mass incarceration of civilians via enclavisation or encirclement (as was done in a number of cities and neighbourhoods in Iraq, or indeed Strategic Hamlets in Vietnam), and how these forms prepare civilian spaces for door-to-door search-and-sweeps, intelligence gathering, and collective punishment of civilians that are the hallmarks of such asymmetric and unconventional warfare.

Learn more about Time in the Shadows at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith S. Weis's "Walking Sideways"

Judith S. Weis is Professor of Biology at Rutgers-Newark. She is the author of Do Fish Sleep? and coauthor of Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Walking Sideways: The Remarkable World of Crabs, and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses territorial behavior of fiddler crabs. Fiddlers live in the intertidal zone and are active during low tide, when people can easily observe them without snorkels or scuba gear. Fiddlers are unusual, since they are not active when underwater, but out in the air. Fiddlers are small (1-2 inches across) and named for the enlarged claw of the males, which they wave to attract females. They dig burrows with multiple uses: to hide from predators, use during high tide, recover from a molt when soft shelled and especially vulnerable, and (for some) mate. While most are tropical, some species live in temperate zones and hibernate during the winter. Since burrows are of major importance, they defend them from other crabs. When a wandering crab approaches a burrow “owner” the owner may chase it away or make contact and push it away. Fights may ensue, in which one crab is picked up and flipped over by the other. I describe a study of a species which also defended burrows of their neighbors, but only when the neighbor was smaller and the intruder was of intermediate size. This provides an advantage to the defender since it is easier to have the smaller original neighbor than to re-negotiate territory boundaries with a new larger neighbor. In another species, males protected female neighbors from male but not from female intruders. Since females sometimes mate with their neighbors, this “chivalrous” behavior could result in mating opportunities.

Crabs have other fascinating behaviors - varied feeding behaviors and defenses from predators, walking (sideways and forwards), swimming, communications (visual, chemical, or sound) that are described. Other chapters cover other aspects of crab biology including their habitats (deep sea, freshwater, dry land, even trees), anatomy and physiology, reproduction and life cycle, ecology (including the important change from small floating larva to bottom-dwelling adult, extensive migrations (land crabs must migrate many miles to release their larvae in the ocean) and interactions with other organisms. Various crabs live with seaweeds, sea anemones, sea urchins, or jellyfish – which generally provide protection to the crab. Of greatest importance to a hermit crab is finding the right size snail shell to live in – this can produce aggression or cooperation. The chapter “Crab Problems and Problem Crabs” covers various diseases and parasites that crabs can have (including a bizarre parasite that causes “parasitic castration”), as well as crabs that are themselves parasites or arrive in new locations and make trouble – “invasive species.” There are also chapters dealing with interactions of crabs and humans – one about crab fisheries, another about eating crabs, and the last chapter about crabs as pets, in astrology and mythology, and in popular culture.

Learn more about Walking Sideways at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melanie Challenger's "On Extinction"

Melanie Challenger is the author of Galatea, an award-winning first collection of poems, and co-author, with Zlata Filipovic, of Stolen Voices, a history of twentieth-century conflict compiled through war diaries. She has received a British Council Darwin Award for her work. She lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Challenger applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature, and reported the following:

On being asked to perform the 99 Test on my book On Extinction, I turned to the requisite page only to discover that in this edition of the book, the page is a blank. At first I stared at the blank page and felt rather silly. But, then, of course, it struck me. On Extinction is just that: a meditation on the loss of species, places, ways of life, languages, and an exploration of the human capacity to feel loss. It's a book about this point in human history, when the Earth's diversity and also, in different ways, the diversity of human experience is under threat. And so a blank page is actually rather poetic, rather redolent of the subject. Think, for instance, of the permanent silence of the song of New Zealand's wonderful Laughing Owl or of the thrumming wings of Kerr's Noctuid Moth. Think of the last breath of the last speaker of the Eyak language spoken by tribes from the mouth of Copper River. The particular dreams and myths and intonations of their way of life were extinguished on the speaker's deathbed. And so a blank page is suggestive of extinction itself but also of the unwritten annals of the future. While I can’t pretend to readers that On Extinction is a laugh-a-minute, it’s none-the-less a heartfelt, deeply hopeful book. My argument throughout is that there are sentiments intrinsic to human nature that might yet enable us to resist the destruction of other life-forms and of the special ways we inhabit the earth. In this way, that blank page also points to the possibility that the future environmental disaster is not inevitable, if, and only if, these sentiments can be aroused in us.

Learn more about On Extinction at the Counterpoint website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brycchan Carey's "From Peace to Freedom"

Brycchan Carey is currently reader in English literature, Kingston University, London. He is the author of British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657-1761, and reported the following:

From Peace to Freedom tells the story of how Quakers, first in Barbados and later in Pennsylvania, came to question slavery and later to outlaw it within the Society of Friends, as the Quakers are also known. Appropriately, therefore, page 99 discusses the somewhat strained relationship between Friends in those two places, showing how Barbadian and Philadelphian Friends corresponded over the slavery question in 1698, and how Friends in the more northerly colony requested that those from the Caribbean send no more slaves to Pennsylvania. This was one of several similar moves by Quakers in Pennsylvania that, on first sight, look like statements of antislavery but which on closer inspection emerge from less noble motives; page 99 concludes with the observation that “the reason given in 1698 was neither the Golden Rule nor the assertion of African humanity, but merely that Philadelphian Quakers felt that slaves ‘are too numerous here.’ Opposition to slavery was not always motivated by the purest humanitarianism.” This, sadly, would prove to be true on several other occasions.

The most visible feature of page 99 is the long quotation in the middle of the page. This is a substantial portion of the text of the letter sent in 1698 by Friends in Philadelphia to those in Barbados. This long quotation is not unusual. Throughout the book I have quoted generously from sources that are not easily accessible to the general reader. On other pages, one can find the full text of the 1688 Germantown Protest Against Slavery, plentiful minutes of debates in Quaker meetings which reveal that Friends were not above arguing with one another, lengthy extracts from pamphlets by pioneering antislavery Quakers such as John Hepburn and Ralph Sandiford, and a full report of what the eccentric Quaker Benjamin Lay actually said when he famously spattered the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting with fake blood in 1738.

All in all, page 99 is representative of the book as a whole in that it shows that early Quaker antislavery was tentative and often rather self-serving at the same time that it was intercolonial and international. The page also displays my method of quoting extensively from primary texts. On this occasion, Ford Madox Ford’s test holds good!

Learn more about the book and author at Brycchan Carey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Papineau's "Philosophical Devices"

David Papineau has a BSc in mathematics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a BA and PhD in philosophy from Cambridge. Since 1990 he has been Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. He was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science from 1993 to 1995. In 1999-2000 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow and in 2007 a Mind Fellow. He was President of the Mind Association for 2009-10. In 2010 he gave the Rudolf Carnap Lectures in Bochum, Germany and in 2011 the Gottlob Frege Lectures in Tartu, Estonia.

Papineau applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Sets, and reported the following:

On page 99 I come to the end of my introduction to subjective probabilities and start on objective probabilities. As I explain, ‘subjective probabilities’ are simply psychological states, the degrees to which we subjectively expect certain outcomes. Objective probabilities are quite different—they are out in the world, not in people’s heads. They quantify the objective tendency for certain kinds of results to happen, and would still have existed even if people with degrees of expectation had never evolved.

Probability is just one of the ‘philosophical devices’ discussed in my book. The aim of the book is to introduce philosophy students and others to some of the technical ideas assumed in present-day philosophical writing. Once philosophy students get beyond the foothills, they are likely to start coming across passing references to ideas like denumerability, Bayesian conditionalization, modal scope distinctions, logical completeness, and so on. Yet often there will be nothing in their education designed to explain these technical notions to them.

The book aims to remedy this. As the subtitle explains, it deals, not just with probability, but also sets, possibilities and proofs. More specifically, the book contains four sections, each of three chapters. The first section is about sets and numbers, starting with the membership relation and ending with the generalized continuum hypothesis. The second is about analyticity, a prioricity and necessity. The third is about probability, outlining the difference between objective and subjective probability and exploring aspects of conditionalization and correlation. The fourth deals with metalogic, focusing on the contrast between syntax and semantics, and finishing with a sketch of Godel’s theorem.

I do this all in under 50,000 words including exercises and solutions. Some will think that a book like this can only be a bluffer’s guide. But I think I explain everything properly, and moreover make it philosophically interesting. Of course I don’t provide the depth available from higher-level courses in mathematical logic and the like. But for readers who will never go near such courses, I at least offer a way of understanding what the experts are talking about.

When I explained the idea of this book to one of my more technical colleagues, he complained ‘But you’re just picking all the plums!’ Exactly. I want readers of this book to enjoy the juicy fruit that are normally available only to specialists.

Learn more about Philosophical Devices at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue