Pg. 69: "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain"

This morning's feature at The Page 69 Test is Sharon Begley's Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain.

From the publisher:

Is it really possible to change the structure and function of the brain, and in so doing alter how we think and feel? The answer is a resounding yes. In late 2004, leading Western scientists joined the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India, to address this very question–and in the process brought about a revolution in our understanding of the human mind. In this fascinating and far-reaching book, Wall Street Journal science writer Sharon Begley reports on how cutting-edge science and the ancient wisdom of Buddhism have come together to show how we all have the power to literally change our brains by changing our minds. These findings hold exciting implications for personal transformation. [read more about the book]

Among the praise for Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain:

“There are two great things about this book. One is that it shows us how nothing about our brains is set in stone. The other is that it is written by Sharon Begley, one of the best science writers around. Begley is superb at framing the latest facts within the larger context of the field. She also gives us the back stories that reveal how human the process of science research is. This is a terrific book.”
—Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

“Reading this book is like opening doors in the mind. Sharon Begley brings the reader right to the intersection of scientific and meditative understanding, a place of exciting potential for personal and global transformation. And she does it so skillfully as to seem effortless.”
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience

“It is very seldom that a science in its infancy is so skillfully unpacked that it reads like a detective novel. The fact that this science includes collaborative efforts of neuroscientists, psychologists, contemplatives, philosophers, and the full engagement of the genius of the Dalai Lama is not only fascinating, but uplifting and inspiring. This book lets you know that how you pay attention to your experience can change your entire way of being.”
—Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Coming to Our Senses

Read an excerpt from Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain and check out how the page 69 test served the book.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Immortal Game"

David Shenk's The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain was featured yesterday at The Page 69 Test.

From the publisher's synopsis:

A surprising, charming, and ever-fascinating history of the seemingly simple game that has had a profound effect on societies the world over.

Why has one game, alone among the thousands of games invented and played throughout human history, not only survived but thrived within every culture it has touched? What is it about its thirty-two figurative pieces, moving about its sixty-four black and white squares according to very simple rules, that has captivated people for nearly 1,500 years? Why has it driven some of its greatest players into paranoia and madness, and yet is hailed as a remarkably powerful intellectual tool? [read more of the synopsis]

Here is a sample of the considerable praise the author is enjoying:

"A thrilling tour... an engaging, colorful look at a world that blissfully remains black-and-white."
—Entertainment Weekly

"Shenk, a spry writer... [offers] a strong case for the game's bewitching power."
—The New York Times

"Fresh and fascinating... a world-spanning story [Shenk] relates with skill and verve."
—Chicago Sun-Times

"Before reading David Shenk's wonderful new book, I had at best a casual interest in chess. It seemed too ancient to untangle, too complex to decipher with any real appreciation. But Shenk, in a book filled with daring moves and cunning patience, has made a believer out of me."
—Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics

"I loved this book. Full of burning enthusiasm for the greatest intellectual game in the world, it shows just what can happen when an accomplished author, full of fire and passion, tackles a most wonderful and intricate story. Like a great chess game, this is an achievement that will be talked about for many years to come."
—Simon Winchester, author of A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 and The Professor and the Madman

Read an excerpt and check out how the page 69 test served the book.

David Shenk's most recent article for Slate is "The Survivalist Returns: What's wrong with the CDC's new pandemic planning guide."

--Marshal Zeringue

"What is Patrick Thaddeus Jackson reading?"

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is the author of Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West.

I asked him what he has been reading. His reply:

I'm on sabbatical at the moment, so for the first time in a while I am getting to read books that are not directly related to the courses that I am teaching at any given time! I tend to read in "channels" when I can, simultaneously reading books in different genres at different times during the day or week. I am presently in the middle of four books:

1) in the philosophy channel, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. A classic, and one that I have to admit that I've never read cover-to-cover before. I'm extremely interested in the relationship between knowledge and experience, and Kant is a seminal thinker of this relationship. Since one of my sabbatical goals is to eventually spend some time wallowing in American pragmatism (Dewey, James, Rorty), I thought it was best to go back to some of the traditional works first; after Kant I plan some Hegel, Vico, Durkheim, and Weber.

2) in the historical channel, David McCullough's John Adams. I started this book some years ago when it first came out, but had to put it aside half-finished because other things (like working to get tenure, and having kids!) intervened. Now at last I have been able to pick it up again, and am enjoying McCullough's ability to spin an engrossing narrative of the American founding. Next up on this channel: Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton.

3) in the spirituality channel, Parker Palmer's To Know as We Are Known. It's a fascinating book in which the author presents a re-visioning of higher education in terms of the practices of a truth-seeking community, using the monastic tradition as a kind of inspirational guide. My favorite line this far: "Objectivist education is a strategy for avoiding our own conversion. If we can keep reality 'out there,' we can avoid, for a while, the truth that lays the claim of community on our individual and collective lives." Next up: Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy.

4) finally in the fiction channel, I just finished Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn. Banks is my favorite currently-working science fiction author, and this book -- although not part of his "Culture" series -- is an intriguing tale of a future earth in which people live their lives mostly or completely online as part of the "cryptosphere." A quarter of the book is written from the perspective of a character who can only spell phonetically, and those portions of the book basically need to be read out loud in order to make sense. Fascinating stuff, and Banks is brilliant as always. (His Excession and Look to Windward should be on everyone's reading-list, as they are both marvelous tales about the arrogance of a dominant society intervening in the affairs of less-powerful societies so as to "improve" them.) Next up: either Justin Lieber's Beyond Rejection or Stephen Baxter's Coalescent.

Visit Patrick's teaching blog and faculty homepage.

About Civilizing The Enemy: page 69 test.

--Marshal Zeringue

(This post first appeared on Writers Read.)

Eric Klinenberg, "Fighting for Air"

Andrew Grant-Thomas, Deputy Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, reviews Eric Klinenberg's Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007):

As Eric Klinenberg notes in the introduction to Fighting for Air, his new book tells two important stories. The first story, occupying most of the book, documents the dramatic rise in US media consolidation, especially over the last decade.

The problem Klinenberg describes isn’t simply that lax federal ownership rules allow media giants like Clear Channel Communications and Viacom to own as many as eight radio stations locally (and an unlimited number of stations nationally) and therefore dominate particular radio markets. It’s also that these companies’ substantial freedom to accumulate holdings across media formats and “up and down the media chain”– that’s Ted Turner there – places overall information dominance well within the reach of media conglomerates even in many large markets. In Chicago, for example, the Tribune Company’s multimedia vehicles include television and radio stations, newspapers and magazines, the Internet and direct mail services, and reach “6.4 million people or more than 90% of the market” (36). That claim belongs not to Klinenberg, but to Tribune Company president and CEO Dennis FitzSimons.

For the author and many of the media insiders, activists and other stakeholders who appear in Fighting for Air, the costs of pronounced media consolidation are myriad and they are serious. The book begins with Klinenberg’s reportorial account of an unfolding disaster in Minot, North Dakota. A freight train carrying anhydrous ammonia derails at 1:39 am on January 18, 2002, releasing its toxic cargo. In the ensuing crisis, frightened residents tune into the local radio station for safety instructions and other information. But Clear Channel owns and operates the station from 1,600 miles away, in San Antonio, and no actual person is available to override the station’s canned programming, much less take in and disseminate information. By the next day one person has died and more than 300 people have suffered injuries that might have been avoided had the emergency system operated as intended.

The role of local radio and television in crisis communication is only the first of many consolidation casualties Klinenberg documents. Media conglomerates want to make money; producing local programming is expensive. So production control gravitates upward and homogenized content with perhaps a thin patina of local flavor is the result. Information about local affairs becomes harder to come by and increasingly superficial or out-and-out fake. The news, music and entertainment borne on “local” airwaves accords less often with local interests and tastes; truly local voices, artistic and otherwise, are squeezed out. Increasingly, local media fail to create and bind community identity as they otherwise might. Increasingly, the public becomes disaffected.

Then there’s political censorship – the diversity of viewpoints lost; the stories covered poorly or not at all, in accordance with the parent company’s financial and/or ideological interests. Think Dixie Chicks, Stolen Honor, and the Chicago White Sox (who, it is suggested, got little local coverage even after winning the World Series in 2005 because the market-dominant Tribune Company owns the rival Chicago Cubs). And let’s not forget jobs. Klinenberg cites one estimate that “industry pressure from consolidation resulted in a net loss of ten thousand radio-related jobs between 2000 and 2002” alone (65). Across industries, the employment toll may number in the hundreds of thousands.

Klinenberg makes a good case for stakes in the consolidation game that go even beyond these, but you get the idea.

The second story Klinenberg tells in Fighting for Air concerns the rise of a media reform movement determined to resist and even reverse the pronounced consolidation trend to which he devotes most of the book. Whereas the broad outline of the first story is at least familiar to many of us, the second is probably less so. Just last month, some 3500 media activists showed up in Memphis for the National Conference for Media Reform, with many more participating online. Who knew? And that's exactly Klinenberg's point – many of us don’t know about the growing grassroots pushback against Big Media because it’s not in Big Media’s interest to tell us about it.

Klinenberg tells both stories well and from a range of perspectives. For the most part, I believe him. As in his previous blockbuster, Heat Wave, he’s especially good at highlighting his stories’ “human” elements, while also pulling back for a look at the larger political and economic forces that are also indispensable players in the dynamic he describes. If there are familiar villains in this drama – spineless policymakers, unscrupulous corporations, the Federal Communications Commission – he also does well to highlight the role of heroes the cynical among us may find unlikely and to point to even unlikelier political bedfellows. FCC Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, both Democrats, fare very well in this account. At various points, we find the likes of Trent Lott, the National Rifle Association and the National Organization for Women lined up firmly on one side of the issue, with groups like National Public Radio, the National Association of Broadcasters and the Bush Administration on the other.

I did have a couple issues with Fighting for Air, especially in the context of a book review for a blog created to “encourage more readers to read more books.” Um, what about books? The number of books (and magazines) being published is growing fast, and the diversity of viewpoints they represent probably is as well. I can’t seriously fault Klinenberg for not adding 50 pages to a book that already covers a wide range of media to consider whether books and magazines represent a countervailing trend to the homogenizing, anti-democratic impulse consolidation embodies. But surely it was worth a mention? (He does include a sensible discussion of what the internet brings and doesn’t bring to the table in that regard.) He is a writer of books and articles, after all, and his books in particular certainly have enriched the debate on important public issues.

I also would have liked to see him pay more than token attention to the question of who media consolidation hurts. Consolidation may make losers of us all, but not equally. According to a recent study by Free Press, racial and ethnic minorities are one-third of the US population but only 3 percent of TV station owners. Women comprise 51 percent of the population and barely 5 percent of owners. Media ownership is obviously class-inflected. Since, in my view, working-class and poor people, women and racial and ethnic minorities are groups whose interests, needs, and perspectives tend to be underrepresented throughout public life and in definitions of and decision-making around the “public welfare” in any case, the stakes involved in any anti-democratic movement is likely to be especially great for them. How consolidation might differentially affect these groups deserved some elaboration.

Finally, I’m left feeling a bit uncertain about the scope of Klinenberg’s claims. On one hand, I think he’s right to say that media consolidation exacerbates a host of ills. But one can be forgiven for thinking, by the end of the book, that consolidation created those ills and that they would be largely undone if the consolidation trend could be reversed. I’m not so sure. Political censorship and big stories missed, ignored, or squelched are hardly recent phenomena. Media consolidation matters, but what else is going on? I’d have liked to see him engage that question. It’s a big one.

But these are mainly sins of omission, rather than commission. Fighting for Air tells two big stories. At this point, the one about consolidation is hard to miss. If Klinenberg is right, the one about the burgeoning media reform movement may be the most important story hardly told in America today.

Many thanks to Andrew for the thorough and insightful review.

Andrew Grant-Thomas received his B.A. in Literature from Yale University, his M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.

Eric Klinenberg recently put Fighting for Air to the page 69 test.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tomorrow on the blogs

Here at the CftAR: Thomas C. Schelling's influential books.

I can think of no social scientist's work which influenced my training as a political scientist more than that of Thomas Schelling. And there's a Master's thesis in the Tulane library to prove it. But what books does Professor Schelling consider the more influential? And has his view changed in the last twenty years? Find out tomorrow.

Also, "What is Patrick Thaddeus Jackson reading?"

And over at The Page 69 Test: Sharon Begley's Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain

Book description, from the publisher:

Is it really possible to change the structure and function of the brain, and in so doing alter how we think and feel? The answer is a resounding yes. In late 2004, leading Western scientists joined the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India, to address this very question–and in the process brought about a revolution in our understanding of the human mind. In this fascinating and far-reaching book, Wall Street Journal science writer Sharon Begley reports on how cutting-edge science and the ancient wisdom of Buddhism have come together to show how we all have the power to literally change our brains by changing our minds. These findings hold exciting implications for personal transformation.

For decades, the conventional wisdom of neuroscience held that the hardware of the brain is fixed and immutable–that we are stuck with what we were born with. As Begley shows, however, recent pioneering experiments in neuroplasticity, a new science that investigates whether and how the brain can undergo wholesale change, reveal that the brain is capable not only of altering its structure but also of generating new neurons, even into old age. The brain can adapt, heal, renew itself after trauma, and compensate for disability.

Begley documents how this fundamental paradigm shift is transforming both our understanding of the human mind and our approach to deep-seated emotional, cognitive, and behavioral problems. These breakthroughs show that it is possible to reset our happiness meter, regain the use of limbs disabled by stroke, train the mind to break cycles of depression and OCD, and reverse age-related changes in the brain. They also suggest that it is possible to teach and learn compassion, a key step in the Dalai Lama’s quest for a more peaceful world. But as we learn from studies performed on Buddhist monks, an important component in changing the brain is to tap the power of mind and, in particular, focused attention. This is the classic Buddhist practice of mindfulness, a technique that has become popular in the West and that is immediately available to everyone.

With her extraordinary gift for making science accessible, meaningful, and compelling, Sharon Begley illuminates a profound shift in our understanding of how the brain and the mind interact. This tremendously hopeful book takes us to the leading edge of a revolution in what it means to be human.

--Marshal Zeringue

Page 69 is migrating

The Page 69 Series is getting awfully large and starting to crowd out some of the other postings on the blog. So I gave it a home of its own.

There will still be a link here at the CftAR -- look to the right column --and I plan to alert readers here when a new item goes up on the new blog.

Also, the new blog will have a continually updated list of all entries. This tactic may be bad news for those who read the blog using a feed -- it means an email for every new list -- but at least there won't be a very long list of all the books in the series at the bottom of every entry.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to making the series so successful, and thanks for reading.

The latest entry in the series: David Shenks, The Immortal Game.

--Marshal Zeringue

Historymike on "Chechnya"

Last week, Michael Brooks of Historymike published a review of Anatol Lieven's Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power.

If you don't have the time or sufficient interest to read the book, Michael's review is a good place to get a feel for the subject.

Of course, I recommend starting with -- or, if you're interested in literature but not history, skipping to -- Tolstoy's great novella, Hadji Murat. It's a fictionalized account of the actual Murat, a leader of the Chechen resistance (though not a Chechen himself), in the Caucasian peoples' campaign against the Russian empire in the early nineteenth century. It's a brilliant story.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Martial Law"

Matthew Warshauer is Associate Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University.

His new book is Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Martial Law.

I asked Matt to apply the "page 69 test" to his book. Here is his reply:

Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Martial Law: Nationalism, Civil Liberties, and Partisanship is about the first time that civil liberties and the writ of habeas corpus were ever suspended in the United States. The book deals with how broad nationalism allows civil liberties to be circumvented, and how politicians manipulate important issues to better their own or their party’s needs. Jackson’s actions set a precedent for emergency powers that subsequent leaders have not hesitated to utilize. When his use of martial law was ultimately debated years after he actually imposed it, the parties of the day were as much if not more interested in using the issue to influence upcoming presidential and congressional elections. Jackson was able to push the matter through the Congress because of his own political prowess and popularity, as well as the Democratic Party’s devotion to him and his nationalist popularity. The larger question around which all of this revolves is, are there times when the letter of the law should bend to extreme necessity. Americans have differing views on this question. Yet the really big issue for me is that the very first time our legislators debated the issue, they weren’t focused enough on ideological conviction and what was best for the nation. Rather, they engaged in the same partisan bickering and maneuvering that we are so tired of today. A disconcerting fact to be sure!

Like other authors who have written about p. 69 in their books, I was at first concerned that one page would not adequately or accurately reflect the larger focus of my work. Yet when reading the page, I was pleasantly surprised that it does reflect some of the major themes that I’ve outlined above. The page has to do with Jackson’s run at the White House and how supporters made the issue of martial law, his arrest of Louisiana State Senator Louis Louaillier and Federal District Judge Dominick Hall, a test for being patriotic:

“Nor did the general’s defenders stop at denouncing men like Judge Hall and Senator Louaillier as conspirators and turncoats…. Exposing Hall’s supposedly unconstitutional acts entered the complicated realm of legalese, and Jackson’s partisans much preferred sticking to basic, clearly understood points. Comparing Jackson to Washington was one such strategy. Making the support of martial law and of Jackson a matter of patriotism was another. The reverse, of course, as was shown with the attacks upon Hall and Louaillier, was that anyone criticizing Jackson was unpatriotic. ‘The man whose bosom does not swell with pride at the recollection of his [Jackson’s] exploits,’ announced one speaker before a crowd in New York, ‘possesses not an American heart.’ Maj. Henry Lee, son of Henry ‘Light Horse Harry’ Lee, made a similar implication, announcing, ‘I am…satisfied, that no friend to his country, can lay his hand on his heart and say, he [Jackson] did not perform’ his duty."

Many thanks to Matt for the input.

In “Bad Precedent: Andrew Jackson’s Assault on Habeas Corpus,” The New Yorker, Caleb Crain wrote:

He [Jackson] defied a writ of habeas corpus, the legal privilege recognized by the Constitution which allows someone being detained to insist that a judge look into his case. Jackson was fined for his actions, and, for the rest of his life, was shadowed by the charge that he had behaved tyrannically. In retirement, after two terms as President, he called on his reserves of political clout to get the fine refunded, and Congress ended up debating the legality of his actions in New Orleans for nearly two years. As Matthew Warshauer argues in a lucid and well-researched new book, “Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Martial Law” (University of Tennessee; $39.95), the debates changed the definition of martial law in American jurisprudence. They also set a precedent for granting emergency powers to the executive branch which remains a troubling legacy today.

Matthew Warshauer is also the author of the forthcoming Andrew Jackson: First Men, America’s Presidents. His articles have appeared in Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Connecticut History, Louisiana History, and New York History.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
John Nadler, A Perfect Hell
David Lehman, When a Woman Loves a Man
Gary Krist, The White Cascade
Vicki Lane, Art's Blood
David Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire
Peggy Orenstein, Waiting for Daisy
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, My Year Inside Radical Islam
Mark Coggins, Candy from Strangers
Arthur Allen, Vaccine
Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child
Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare
Trinie Dalton, Wide Eyed
Barbara J. King, Evolving God
Patrick Anderson, The Triumph of the Thriller
Linda R. Hirshman, Get to Work
Lynne Tillman, American Genius, A Comedy
Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter
Dana Stabenow, A Deeper Sleep
Siobhan Roberts, King of Infinite Space
Erin McKean, That's Amore!
Michael Lowenthal, Charity Girl
Niraj Kapur, Heaven's Delight
Keith Dixon, The Art of Losing
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old
Mary Sharratt, The Vanishing Point
David Fulmer, The Dying Crapshooter's Blues
Anya Ulinich, Petropolis
Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization
Olen Steinhauer, Liberation Movements
Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation
Julie Kistler, Scandal
Robert Ward, Four Kinds of Rain
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist
William Landay, The Strangler
Kate Holden, In My Skin
Brian Wansick, Mindless Eating
Noria Jablonski, Human Oddities
Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity
Neal Pollack, Alternadad
Bella DePaulo, Singled Out
Steve Hamilton, A Stolen Season
Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air
Donna Moore, ...Go to Helena Handbasket
Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye
Neal Thompson, Riding with the Devil
Sherry Argov, Why Men Marry Bitches
P.J. Parrish, An Unquiet Grave
Tyler Knox, Kockroach
Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency
Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
Jeremy Blachman, Anonymous Lawyer
Andrew Pyper, The Wildfire Season
Wendy Werris, An Alphabetical Life
Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
Meghan Daum, The Quality of Life Report
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin' Man
Richard Aleas, Little Girl Lost
Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom
John McFetridge, Dirty Sweet
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero
Bill Crider, Murder Among the OWLS
Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
Matt Haig, The Dead Fathers Club
Lawrence Light, Fear & Greed
Simon Read, In The Dark
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "A Perfect Hell"

John Nadler is the author of Searching for Sofia and, more recently, A Perfect Hell: The True Story of the Black Devils, the Forefathers of the Special Forces.

I asked John to apply the "page 69 test" to his book. Here is what he reported:

When first hearing of Marshal's page 69 formula for book appreciation, I wondered if the symbolism was spicily sexual. You know, a reference to the position the French call Soixante-Neuf, and the Kansas legislature calls Statutory Sodomy.

Of course, page 69 is an infinitely sensible point to delve into any book since it is almost always the story's point of no return.

But when delving into my own book, the WWII narrative history A Perfect Hell I realized I was right the first time. I had hoped that my page 69 would be a moment of deadly decision on the part of my characters: the men of the First Special Service Force (FSSF), the U.S. commando unit history would remember as the Black Devils and the pioneers of today's Special Forces.

In fact, page 69, true to the best French calculus, described a fanciful moment of romance between four characters during a summer of one of the most terrible years of 20th Century.

1942: a new unit promising extreme danger and early entry to combat is created, and volunteers are called across the U.S. and Canada. Two young men, Joe Glass and Lorin Waling – the former, a Great Lakes seaman; the latter, a prairie farm boy – answer the call, and end up in Helena, Montana, where the secret unit (and 2000 fellow commandos) is based. Helena's town fathers adopt the young warriors. And so do the daughters. On page 69 the fast wartime friends, would-be commandos Joe and Lorin, sneak from their beds, barracks, and base, and rendezvous with their two local girlfriends.

The women, Dorothy and Steffie, have driven a car, headlights darkened, to the rear of the base where there are only snakes, coolies, and a limitless nightscape of prairie. They avoid capture from a sentry by hiding under a blanket on the floorboards until the boys arrive. And when Joe and Lorin get there, the two couples drive to Helena for an AWOL night on the town.

This evening of desertion is the start of a romance that would survive a world war and last a lifetime.

Thanks to John for the input.

Read the prologue to the Canadian edition and the prologue to the US edition.

Among the praise for A Perfect Hell:

"[A] superb popular history.... This solidly researched and smartly written volume is a fitting tribute to a unique group of warriors."
—Publishers Weekly

“Well-written, simply crafted and deeply evocative, Nadler's blend of storytelling and research puts a human face on the war, one not often seen in military histories. In A Perfect Hell, the anonymous soldiers become men, with their own stories and memories.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“A Perfect Hell is a solid addition to the many histories on Canada’s proud war tradition, and a darn good read about the outsized acts of decent, ordinary men.” –Toronto Star

Last year Olen Steinhauer posed 5 Questions to John about his book and writing.

Read some of John's feature articles, including his TIME interview with Istvan Szabo.

Prompted by the death of E. Howard Hunt last month, John asked: do conspiracies exist?

Visit John's official website and Contemporary Nomad, a group blog.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
David Lehman, When a Woman Loves a Man
Gary Krist, The White Cascade
Vicki Lane, Art's Blood
David Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire
Peggy Orenstein, Waiting for Daisy
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, My Year Inside Radical Islam
Mark Coggins, Candy from Strangers
Arthur Allen, Vaccine
Beth Ann Fennelly, Great with Child
Kenneth Gross, Shylock Is Shakespeare
Trinie Dalton, Wide Eyed
Barbara J. King, Evolving God
Patrick Anderson, The Triumph of the Thriller
Linda R. Hirshman, Get to Work
Lynne Tillman, American Genius, A Comedy
Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter
Dana Stabenow, A Deeper Sleep
Siobhan Roberts, King of Infinite Space
Erin McKean, That's Amore!
Michael Lowenthal, Charity Girl
Niraj Kapur, Heaven's Delight
Keith Dixon, The Art of Losing
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old
Mary Sharratt, The Vanishing Point
David Fulmer, The Dying Crapshooter's Blues
Anya Ulinich, Petropolis
Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization
Olen Steinhauer, Liberation Movements
Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation
Julie Kistler, Scandal
Robert Ward, Four Kinds of Rain
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist
William Landay, The Strangler
Kate Holden, In My Skin
Brian Wansick, Mindless Eating
Noria Jablonski, Human Oddities
Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity
Neal Pollack, Alternadad
Bella DePaulo, Singled Out
Steve Hamilton, A Stolen Season
Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air
Donna Moore, ...Go to Helena Handbasket
Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye
Neal Thompson, Riding with the Devil
Sherry Argov, Why Men Marry Bitches
P.J. Parrish, An Unquiet Grave
Tyler Knox, Kockroach
Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency
Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
Jeremy Blachman, Anonymous Lawyer
Andrew Pyper, The Wildfire Season
Wendy Werris, An Alphabetical Life
Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
Meghan Daum, The Quality of Life Report
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin' Man
Richard Aleas, Little Girl Lost
Paul Collins, The Trouble With Tom
John McFetridge, Dirty Sweet
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero
Bill Crider, Murder Among the OWLS
Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens
Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
Matt Haig, The Dead Fathers Club
Lawrence Light, Fear & Greed
Simon Read, In The Dark
Sandra Ruttan, Suspicious Circumstances
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue