Joshua O. Reno's "Home Signs"

Joshua O. Reno is professor and graduate director of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is the author of several books, including Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness and, with Britt Halvorson, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest.

Reno applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language and reported the following:

My latest book is about the subtle ways that we all communicate with those closest to us using facial expressions, gestures, bodily movement and contact, that is, without words. The passage that concerns me here is from the third chapter, which is the only one in the book that appeared previously, twelve years ago in fact, as a standalone article.

Like that article and like all the other chapters of this book, page 99 focuses a lot on my non-verbal son, Charlie. Charlie was diagnosed on the autism spectrum years ago and non-verbal communication is all that he has, so he offers a useful case study of how much we can do without language. Nearly one hundred pages in, and I am explaining how attempts to get him to use language have failed over the years (twelve years ago and in the present day). I describe one method in particular, known as PECS, which is a method specifically designed by speech and language therapists to get people like him to learn to exchange words (in the form of symbols) for things they want. But from another point of view this is not just an example about how incapable Charlie is of using words. Rather, it shows how well he can assert and express himself:

Sometimes Charlie would push the PECS folder away, a home sign for “I don’t want to do this now.” Sometimes he would decide not to eat at all when he would see it near his food, a sign that he was defying the exercise even if it meant starving himself for that moment. But Charlie’s most common way of defying the exercise, then and now, is to look away while grabbing symbols or tapping icons on a screen. If he did this over and over again, even if I moved the symbols around, eventually he’d get food out of it.... From our perspective, he was too good even then at home signing, at expressing his intentions and modifying interactions without symbols, to the extent that he could work around them if need be.

In that sense, at least, on page 99 readers will encounter something that they have witnessed already for several chapters -- a purportedly “disabled” communicator capably controlling situations and making his intentions known to those around him. Charlie may not do what his teachers and parents want, may refuse to communicate in socially prescribed ways, but in so doing he shows us all that he is neither hapless nor helpless simply because he lives now, and likely will live for his whole life, beyond and beside language.

Learn more about Home Signs at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Waste Away.

The Page 99 Test: Military Waste.

--Marshal Zeringue

Núria Silleras-Fernández's "The Politics of Emotion"

Núria Silleras-Fernández is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliated faculty in the Humanities Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her research focuses on cultural and intellectual history, gender, and literature in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia and the Mediterranean. She is the author of Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship. Maria de Luna (2008) and Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2015).

Silleras-Fernandez applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Politics of Emotion. Love,Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (2024) and reported the following:

This excerpt refers to Isabel of Portugal (r. 1447–1454), one of the case studies I analyze in detail in The Politics of Emotion. It represents the book such that it explores how medieval society understood the dangers of love and desire, which, are explored in my book in conjunction with grief (which at times, turned to “madness”) and are intertwined with the public and the private: government and emotions. Excerpt from page 99:

In fact, we can see Isabel of Portugal and Álvaro de Luna as they are presented in the chronicles as two sides of the same coin. Accounts hostile to the queen accused her of being an object of excessive desire on the part of Juan and lamented her ability to “manipulate” her weak husband. For his part, Álvaro de Luna is presented in exactly the same terms, which were even more worrisome in his case because of the moral implications that same-sex love carried in that era. The accusation of sodomy became a powerful tool to discredit someone and could be deployed for political gain.

Isabel was the queen-consort of Juan II of Castile, and both were the parents of one of the most famous queens of all times, Isabel I of Castile “The Catholic” (r. 1474–1504). The chronicles portrayed Juan II as a weak hedonist, easily manipulated, and always at the mercy of others: first, his royal favorite, friend (and lover?) Álvaro de Luna who was later displaced by the king’s young second wife, Isabel of Portugal. In the Middle Ages, whoever controlled the king (or queen) held great indirect power and thus awakened the envy and criticism of those who coveted this position of influence. Hence, mirrors of princes and princesses were consistent in admonishing the ruler against malicious counselors and conduct literature (which was often misogynistic) warned against the domination a wife could exercise over her husband – particularly a wife like Isabel who not only enjoyed the status of a queen but was the object of the king’s love and lust. Poetry, sentimental fiction, and medical and religious discourse all made the dangers of love clear.

In the end, politics and “social property” ruined this peculiar triangle. Juan II loved his crown more than Álvaro and, to avoid further turmoil, was obliged to condemn him to death in 1453, accused of treason. Within a year the monarch had also died, because as Gonzalo Chacón, a contemporary chronicler, put it, “the burrowing worm of his conscience was what killed him.” For her part, Isabel of Portugal is said to have been overwhelmed by grief after the death of her husband and lived in relative isolation for her remaining forty-two years. Thus, Isabel and Álvaro are two sides of the same coin and comprise an excellent example of the emotional dynamics examined in my study.

Learn more about The Politics of Emotion at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sten Rynning's "NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance"

Sten Rynning has researched and written on NATO for twenty-five years. He is a professor and director of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark, and the author of NATO in Afghanistan and NATO Renewed.

Rynning applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works moderately well for NATO. It captures a key event in the history of the alliance still of great relevance today. But it comes out of a discussion of the fine grains of 1960s alliance politics that for the browser of the book may come across as a bit of ‘inside baseball.’

The fine grains are important, though, because for the reader of the book—as opposed to the browser—they tell the story of why the political seams of the alliance were coming undone. The allies lacked trust, and they were pursuing incompatible national approaches to East-West relations. France had decided to kick NATO headquarters off its territory, and NATO was in addition approaching its twentieth anniversary (in 1969), which by its treaty allowed individual allies to leave the alliance at a one-year notice. Might France be tempted to leave? Might West Germany leave to pursue German unification? The one sure thing was the Soviet desire to stoke trouble.

Into all this—and on page 99 of the book—stepped Pierre Harmel, Belgium’s foreign minister, and undertook a study of NATO’s “future tasks.” This proved a crucial moment for the alliance. Pierre Harmel succeeded in establishing principles that brought allies together and which resonate to this day—that NATO must be able to do both collective defense and East-West diplomacy, and, critically, that defense must come first.

“Defense first” was NATO’s Cold War recipe for countering the threat of political fragmentation. NATO leaders have since invoked this recipe multiple times, also in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. However, NATO allies diverge in their level of support to Ukraine and in their willingness to stand up to Russia. In essence, allies disagree on what “defense first” today means. Page 99 of NATO will help the browser—and especially the reader—understand why this present-day rerun of the Harmel debate is so momentous for the alliance.

Learn more about NATO at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: NATO in Afghanistan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum's "Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists"

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is an award-winning author whose research explores how individuals navigated the traumas of the twentieth century. Her books include Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995 (2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War (2015).

Kirschenbaum applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, and reported the following:

If you opened Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists to page 99, you would find the first page of the chapter on what I call “complex hybrids.” In 1935, these “hybrids,” mostly Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, helped the Soviet satirists Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov pull off an epic 10,000-mile road trip across America. The chapter begins with the observation that the writers’ “dream of seeing and understanding America faced two daunting obstacles: Neither spoke much English and neither knew how to drive.” To overcome these difficulties, they relied on “immigrants from the Russian empire to show them around.” However, the authors omitted most of these mediators from their published travelogue, One-Story America (Odnoetazhnaia Amerika). Page 99 emphasizes that the chapter recovers the stories of the individuals who facilitated Ilf and Petrov’s discovery of America and “reveals a central and incompletely suppressed paradox of their quest: their impressions of ‘real’ America came filtered through the eyes and mouths of outsiders or immigrants.”

The Page 99 Test works well to give readers a sense of the book’s methods and arguments. My interest in retracing Ilf and Petrov’s road trip grew out of a desire to locate the people who worked to construct friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Page 99 introduces a critical, but publicly unacknowledged subset of these individuals – immigrants from the Russian empire, who served as the writers’ guides and translators. Citing Ilf’s notebook, page 99 suggests that clues in the pair’s unpublished writing allowed me to track down many of their contacts. The page also hints at the importance of highways in Ilf and Petrov’s account of America; their early adventures convinced them that to really understand the country, they had to travel by car, not train.

Focused on Ilf and Petrov’s omissions, page 99 sheds little light on how I learned the stories of the pair’s American interlocutors. In the case of the complex hybrids, I relied on personal papers and FBI files. The most challenging problem I faced was finding the more ordinary people with whom Ilf and Petrov interacted. In these cases, I had to generate creative sourcing solutions such as the remarkable series of life history interviews collected in 1935-1936 as part of a survey of San Francisco’s foreign-born population.

Finally, this single page may give readers the mistaken impression that I retraced Ilf and Petrov’s journey primarily as a means of judging their accuracy. While page 99 highlights the writers’ dependence on immigrants, it has little to say about why immigrants wanted to help. Nor does it address the book’s larger goal of understanding the process of cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding. By reading Ilf and Petrov’s notes and narratives against the American sources, the book aims to illuminate the shared concerns as well as the preconceptions and misconceptions that guided and sometimes limited efforts to bridge cultural, linguistic, and political divides.

Learn more about Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Alff's "The Northeast Corridor"

David Alff is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo, where he researches the eighteenth-century Anglophone world.

Alff applied the Page 99 Test to his new book The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region, and reported the following:

My book is a cultural history of the northeast corridor: both the railroad that runs between Boston and Washington, and the seaboard metropolitan region it helped build. This history begins several hundred million years ago, in the Ordovician period, when the microcontinent of Avalonia smashed against proto North America. It ends on New Year’s morning 2021 when Moynihan Train Hall first opened to the public.

Page 99 picks up at a crucial moment in the corridor’s development. It describes Thomas Edison’s construction of an experimental electrical railway in what is today Metropark, New Jersey. I show how Edison’s track drew direct current from his laboratory’s steam generators, and how tourists flocked to Menlo Park for the chance to snag a ride on one of his trains. One journalist recounted how the silent train “shot off like a bullet,” in sharp contrast to the slow percussive build of steam locomotives.

Of my book’s two-hundred-and-eighty-odd pages, 99 is a great place to land. It features one of many passages that describe technological change through story. Drawing on archival research and secondary reading, I try to immerse readers in the details of the past: the crackle of current coursing through iron rails; Edison’s comical indifference to his railway’s frequent wrecks; and the incongruity of the fact that the line terminated beside what is now the fifteenth hole of the Metuchen Golf and Country Club. Such minutiae, I hope, can help us share the wonder that a nation of train passengers felt at dawn of electric railroading.

Beyond my own narrative strategies, page 99 happens to depict a momentous turning point in the history of transportation engineering, as people realized that steam traction was bumping up against physical limits, and faster trains would require remote power generation. Though Edison’s railway was long ago abandoned, reclaimed by forest, and finally buried under suburban tract housing, the technology it tested continues to propel the world’s rapid transit systems and all high-speed passenger trains. The northeast corridor is the busiest and fast inter-city passenger line in North America because its trains receive current from overhead wires (instead of generating it themselves from igniting diesel fuel).

While no single historical anecdote could encompass an infrastructure as wide-ranging and diversely-experienced as the northeast corridor, page 99 offers an unusually representative glimpse into innovations that made the rail line and region what they are today.

Learn more about The Northeast Corridor at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Webster's "Materializing the Middle Passage"

Jane Webster is Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology at the University of Newcastle (UK).

She applied the Page 99 Test to her book Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping 1680-1807, and reported the following:

Page 99 comprises endnotes from Chapter 3 (‘Voices from the Sea: Documentary Narratives of Middle Passage Voyages’). This is unsurprising, indeed characteristic—this is a lengthy book, with more than 1500 notes supporting its 12 Chapters—but is not, for present purposes, illuminating. So, I have turned back to page 90, the last full page of Chapter 3. This contains an extract from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789): one of very few accounts of the voyage on a slave ship written by an African (though see below), and by far the longest. In fact, I make little use of this famous narrative between Chapters 3 and 11, but the reasons for that are a central discussion point in Chapter 12 (‘The Middle Passage Re-Membered: A Conclusion in Three Objects’), where one of the three objects in question is Equiano’s book. By the time readers reach Chapter 12 they have become very familiar with accounts of eighteenth-century slave ships made by British sailors who had crewed them, and who were questioned in Parliament about their experiences (1788-1792). Crew narratives are at the heart of my book: I draw on them repeatedly in exploring the design of British slave ships (Chapter 5), African understandings of these vessels (Chapter 6), the trade goods they carried (Chapter 7), the African goods they transported home to Britain (Chapter 8), and the Middle Passage as experienced by both captives and crews (Chapters 9-11). Equiano’s account appears rarely in these chapters; not because of a fractious, ongoing scholarly debate concerning his birthplace, and questioning whether his account is a fiction, but because virtually everything he had to say about the Middle Passage had been said before, by someone else. As I argue in Chapter 12, I do consider that Equiano’s account is a fiction; but I make that argument whilst asking why so few detailed African accounts of the voyage into slavery exist. My conclusion is that those Africans who endured the slave ship did not want to remember it; or not, at least, in writing. Their Middle Passage was with them forever but, caught somewhere between the imperative to recall and the need to forget, it was remembered in ways that challenge scholarship today.

Learn more about Materializing the Middle Passage at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Bernstein's "Freeman’s Challenge"

Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.

Bernstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, and reported the following:

The 99th page of the book is the first page of Chapter Five, the chapter that narrates the murder at the heart of Freeman’s Challenge. The murder is the challenge, because it threatens the Auburn State Prison, America’s original profit-driven prison. The chapter is called “Work” because that’s the word William Freeman later used to describe the murder. He had been forced to labor in factories inside the Auburn State Prison, and now his “work” of murder would turn the prison inside-out. The 99th page—and the chapter—opens with the full moon rising on a snowy March evening in 1846. Freeman hides his weapons in the folds of his clothes and starts walking south. He walks almost five miles from his home in Auburn toward the neighboring town of Fleming, where his “work” will begin.

This page gives you a great idea of the whole book! Freeman’s Challenge is a work of history, and every word is based on historical sources—but I wanted the book to read like a novel. I wanted to write the kind of book someone would read in one sitting because they couldn’t put it down (and the book is short, so that’s possible!). To manage that balance, I did massive research to recover William Freeman’s experience. The road from Auburn to Fleming is a great example: historical sources told me what that road was like. I knew the road was narrow and slick with mud and slush; I knew that a nearby lake pulsed against the shore. I knew that owls and wolves lived in the woods alongside the road. These truths enabled me to reconstruct Freeman’s experience.

William Freeman’s voice is very important to the book—and to this page. Freeman never wrote or dictated his own story, but people who knew him reported his words. I wove these quotes into Freeman’s Challenge for two reasons: to do justice to Freeman and to make the book enjoyable for the reader. You can hear Freeman’s distinctive voice on this page: as he’s deciding to start out toward Fleming, he regards the sky. “Just at dark,” he calls it, “edge of evening.” I love how William Freeman used language, and his eloquence shines on this page.

This page is also representative of the book because it describes the everyday racism that affected Freeman and every other Black person in New York State (and beyond). As Freeman walks southward, a white man in a cutter—a small sleigh— comes up behind him on the same road. As the man passes Freeman, he looks suspiciously at him. The truth is that Freeman did plan to commit a crime, but the white man had no access to that information. The white man was suspicious simply because a Black man was walking at night—“walking while Black,” we might call it now.

Learn more about Freeman’s Challenge at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian M. Ingrassia's "Speed Capital"

Brian M. Ingrassia is an associate professor of history at West Texas A&M University and the author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a typical page of Speed Capital, but not necessarily an exceptional one. It discusses the 300-mile sweepstakes race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1916. That was the only time, from May 1911 to the present, when the big race was shorter than 500 miles. (It was not held 1917-1918 or 1942-1945.) That page also discusses how Indianapolis became a place for testing automotive technologies, including some that never materialized: in this case, a fuel substitute called "Zoline," which was really a con-man's clever scheme!

Page 99 imparts the book's flavor, but not the full range of courses. Speed Capital uses the story of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's early years to illustrate connections between modern transportation technologies, popular culture, capitalism, and geography. The title is a double entendre: Indianapolis was the capital of speed, but its history conveys how people devised rituals to facilitate and exhibit the speedy movement of capital. The book starts with the idea of "space annihilation": automotive speedways utilized and popularized technologies that elided the tyranny of space and time. Early on, Indianapolis's speedway was a place for both automobility and aviation. But after World War I it narrowed, becoming a place mainly for motor sport. The track also became a site for traditions and nostalgia—for looking back with fondness to earlier eras of technological transformation and popular spectacle. The speedway and its museum, which opened in the 1950s, soon became a site for a different kind of space annihilation: eliminating distance between present and past.

Page 99 briefly mentions Carl Graham Fisher, the primary founder of the speedway. Fisher is a significant yet somewhat overlooked figure in American history, and his life story is a narrative thread running through Speed Capital. Other pages more successfully invoke Fisher and Indianapolis's connections to farther-off places, including Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and New York. Many people traveled from these and other places—from all over the nation and the world—to see the famous races. The book also discusses how Fisher spearheaded important transcontinental routes, namely the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, and even famously transformed a South Florida sandbar into the popular resort town of Miami Beach. Basically, I argue, Fisher taught Americans how to enjoy cars as well as how to use them to consume geographical space.

Learn more about Speed Capital at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosamund Johnston's "Red Tape"

Rosamund Johnston is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969, and reported the following:

Readers who open at page 99 of this book will be met with two young journalists, Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund, who became radio celebrities in postwar Czechoslovakia. This page explores the reasons for their fame, suggesting that it hinged upon their youth, desirability, and ultimately their appeal to socialist politicians and listeners both.

I am delighted that these two are foregrounded by the Page 99 Test: they were in fact the first journalists I wrote about for this book and, as such, set the framework for the rest of Red Tape. They helped me answer the question I posed throughout which was: why might people genuinely like and look forward to censored and propaganda-tinged socialist radio? And they form part of the answer, which I found to be on account of the relationships that listeners fostered with reporters such as Hanzelka and Zikmund through the medium of radio (hearing their voices at a regular time several times a week, writing to them with feedback about their work, and then finding their letters in some ways incorporated into the fabric of the pair’s reports). Hanzelka and Zikmund were broadcasting during Stalinism, and their example shows the responsiveness of radio to listeners’ concerns at that time. They also show that there was more to Stalinist radio than the murderous show-trials (which I write about in other chapters, but which I am delighted are not front and center here).

I was not always able to take a biographical approach to the history of radio in socialist Czechoslovakia—sometimes it made more sense to think about technologies (such as the tape in the title, for example) and how these served to reconfigure listeners’ expectations of the medium. But I always felt the most at home being led through the period by reporters such as Hanzelka and Zikmund and the fan-mail that was addressed to them. In this sense, this page represents some of my favorite lines of inquiry and sources used in this book. Here, I am specifically writing about the generation to which Hanzelka and Zikmund belonged, which, I argue throughout, shaped postwar radio and the rhetorical environment of socialism’s first two decades in Czechoslovakia. When they and their peers (all by now middle-aged) were pushed out of Czechoslovak Radio in the wake of the Soviet-led invasion in 1968—events captured in the final chapter of this book—then, I argue, radio finally ceded its “dominance” to television.

Visit Rosamund Johnston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David W. Congdon's "Who Is a True Christian?"

David W. Congdon is a Senior Editor at the University Press of Kansas, where he acquires new titles in political science, and an Instructor at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. His books include The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann's Dialectical Theology (2015, which won the Rudolf Bultmann Prize in Hermeneutics from the Philipps University of Marburg), and he is the editor of Varieties of Christian Universalism: Exploring Four Views (2023).

Congdon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Who Is a True Christian?: Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, and reported the following:

Here is what I found on page 99 of my book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture:

Newman provides seven tests to determine whether a development is the continuation or the corruption of the idea of Christianity, and the rest of the book applies these tests to particular points of doctrinal controversy. But as David Bentley Hart acknowledges, “these criteria amount to little more than a transparently forced ideological reconstruction of the historical narrative,” requiring both “willful narrative creativity” and “selective ignorance regarding those historical data that the preferred narrative cannot assimilate.” Reducing the complexity of history to the adaptability of an idea made it all too easy for Newman to reconstruct an account of Christian history that supported his argument, and any reconstruction under these presuppositions is “self-evidently specious,” an exercise in “saving the appearances.” Newman’s Essay is a stunning work of historical eisegesis, a retrospective reading of the past that already knows where history leads – namely, to his own position. His failure is thus an instructive one, serving as a cautionary tale for all those people, whether church leaders or Supreme Court justices, who wish to use history to prove the rightness of their beliefs.

To my surprise, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Who Is a True Christian? This page is my analysis of John Henry Newman’s effort to establish historical continuity between the origins of Christianity and Roman Catholic orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. Newman was a prominent figure at the time, but he has become especially important in the last several decades, not only as an inspiration for many converts to Rome but also as an intellectual lodestar for Protestants seeking to prove their fidelity to the ancient rule of faith (regula fidei).

The problem, as I show (with some help from David Bentley Hart), is that Newman’s reconstruction of this history is a convenient just-so story that all too easily leads directly to his own position, as if his account of Christianity were foreordained from the beginning. Newman failed to consider that he could have constructed such a narrative for any version of Christianity. It is always possible to trace how later developments emerge from earlier ones, and if you already know how history ends, the path to get there can seem inevitable.

This passage is particularly fitting as a summary of my book, since I connect Newman’s misuse of history to church leaders and Supreme Court justices—highlighting the way my book joins theological and political history. The quest for “true Christianity” has a political counterpart in the quest for the “true America.” Theologians pursue “historic Christianity” while justices and politicians pursue the “original America.” I suggest in my book that both quests are best abandoned. With respect to religion, I propose replacing the exclusionary pursuit of true Christianity with the open-ended, pluralistic search for new Christianities. Perhaps the same might apply in politics.

The Page 99 Test highlights whether a book remains focused on a clear thesis, and I made an effort to keep the material in my book tethered to my central argument. While not every page in my book would succeed as well as this one, I am pleasantly surprised with how well this page captured a central theme of my work.

Visit David W. Congdon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue