Pg. 99: Felicia Arriaga's "Behind Crimmigration"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America by Felicia Arriaga.

About the book, from the publisher:

In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration—what many have dubbed "crimmigration." Southern border enforcement still monopolizes the national immigration debate, but immigration enforcement has become common within the United States as well. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations are a major part of American immigration enforcement, Felicia Arriaga maintains that ICE relies on an already well-established system—the use of local law enforcement and local governments to identify, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants.

Arriaga contends that the long-term partnership between local sheriffs and immigration law enforcement in places like North Carolina has created a form of racialized social control of the Latinx community. Arriaga uses data from five county sheriff’s offices and their governing bodies to trace the creation and subsequent normalization of ICE and local law enforcement partnerships. Arriaga argues that the methods used by these partnerships to control immigration are employed throughout the United States, but they have been particularly visible in North Carolina, where the Latinx population increased by 111 percent between 2000 and 2010. Arriaga's evidence also reveals how Latinx communities are resisting and adapting to these systems.

Visit Felicia Arriaga's website.

The Page 99 Test: Behind Crimmigration.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Daniel Weizmann

From my Q&A with Daniel Weizmann, author of The Last Songbird:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

It wasn’t the first title of my manuscript, but I think it does a better job of setting the mood. First, a songbird is a thing of mystery and beauty…and like the victim in my mystery, former folk icon Annie Linden, there is a fleeting, capricious, or uncatchable quality to a singing bird. But there’s another even cooler meaning to the title which I myself didn’t see until the book was already off to the printer. Songbird is slang for a female singer, of course, but especially one that came up in the 20th century jazz age—the “canaries” started as caged birds, singing to support the big bands, but by the late ‘60s, many brave female singers really were free entities, writing their own songs and often performing solo too. Annie is the last of...[read on]

Visit Daniel Weizmann's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Songbird.

Q&A with Daniel Weizmann.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eleven westerns that break the genre's rules

Claudia Cravens grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a BA in Literature from Bard College and is a graduate of Catapult's Twelve-Month Novel Generator.

Lucky Red is her first novel.

At Publishers Weekly Cravens tagged eleven "subversive works [in which] people who are often denied agency in traditional westerns—women, people of color, LGBTQ people—insist on telling their own stories." One title on the list:

Outlawed by Anna North

Married to a man she loves and devoted to her work as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife, 17-year-old Ada’s future looks bright. But in this alternate-historical United States, a woman’s fertility is her highest virtue; when a year of marriage passes with no pregnancy for Ada, she must flee town or risk being hanged as a witch. She joins the Hole in the Wall Gang, led by a charismatic former preacher known as The Kid, and they set out to change the future for women like her. While the setting gives Outlawed a bit of Handmaid’s Tale flavor, it also throws the disposability of women in typical westerns into sharp relief. Ada’s faith in herself and her own intelligence pushes back hard against typical tropes of homesteaders’ wives as meek helpmates, placing women’s experiences of their own bodies front and center.

Read about another entry on the list.

Outlawed is among Robin McLean's eight top books about surviving in the wilderness and Christina Sweeney-Baird's seven books that imagine a world without men.

The Page 69 Test: Outlawed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Debbie Sharnak's "Of Light and Struggle"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Of Light and Struggle: Social Justice, Human Rights, and Accountability in Uruguay by Debbie Sharnak.

About the book, from the publisher:

During the country’s dictatorship from 1973 to 1985, Uruguayans suffered under crushing repression, which included the highest rate of political incarceration in the world. In Of Light and Struggle, Debbie Sharnak explores how activists, transnational social movements, and international policymakers collaborated and clashed in response to this era and during the country’s transition back to democratic rule.

At the heart of the book is an examination of how the language and politics of human rights shifted over time as a result of conflict and convergence between local, national, and global dynamics. Sharnak examines the utility and limits of human rights language used by international NGOs, such as Amnesty International, and foreign governments, such as the Carter administration. She does so by exploring tensions between their responses to the dictatorship’s violations and the grassroots struggle for socioeconomic rights as well as new social movements around issues of race, gender, religion, and sexuality in Uruguay. Sharnak exposes how international activists used human rights language to combat repression in foreign countries, how local politicians, unionists, and students articulated more expansive social justice visions, how the military attempted to coopt human rights language for its own purposes, and how broader debates about human rights transformed the fight over citizenship in renewed democratic societies. By exploring the interplay between debates taking place in activists’ living rooms, presidential administrations, and international halls of power, Sharnak uncovers the messy and contingent process through which human rights became a powerful discourse for social change, and thus contributes to a new method for exploring the history of human rights.

By looking at this pivotal period in international history, Of Light and Struggle suggests that discussions around the small country on the Río de la Plata had global implications for the possibilities and constraints of human rights well beyond Uruguay’s shores.

Visit Debbie Sharnak's website.

The Page 99 Test: Of Light and Struggle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Christina Lynch's "Sally Brady's Italian Adventure"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Sally Brady's Italian Adventure by Christina Lynch.

About the book, from the publisher:

What if you found yourself in the middle of a war armed only with lipstick and a sense of humor? Abandoned as a child in Los Angeles in 1931, dust bowl refugee Sally Brady convinces a Hollywood movie star to adopt her, and grows up to be an effervescent gossip columnist secretly satirizing Europe’s upper crust. By 1940 saucy Sally is conquering Fascist-era Rome with cheek and charm.

A good deed leaves Sally stranded in wartime Italy, brandishing a biting wit, a fake passport, and an elastic sense of right and wrong. To save her friends and find her way home through a land of besieged castles and villas, Sally must combat tragedy with comedy, tie up pompous bureaucrats in their own red tape, force the cruel to be kind, and unravel the mystery, weight, and meaning of family.

Heir to Odysseus’s wiles and Candide’s optimism, Sally Brady is a heroine for the 21st century.

Visit Christina Lynch's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Italian Party.

The Page 69 Test: The Italian Party.

Writers Read: Christina Lynch (April 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Sally Brady's Italian Adventure.

Writers Read: Christina Lynch.

The Page 69 Test: Sally Brady's Italian Adventure.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top unlikely friendships in crime fiction

Robyn Harding is the author of numerous books, including the international bestseller The Party, The Swap, which was an instant #1 Globe and Mail (Toronto) and #1 Toronto Star bestseller, and The Perfect Family.

[Coffee with a Canine: Robyn Harding & Ozzie; The Page 69 Test: The Arrangement; My Book, The Movie: The Swap; The Page 69 Test: The Perfect Family]

Harding's new novel is The Drowning Woman.

At CrimeReads she tagged seven of her favorite works of "crime fiction [featuring] unlikely platonic pairings," including:

White Ivy, by Susie Yang

As a young girl growing up outside of Boston, Ivy Lin’s immigrant grandmother teaches her to steal. This affords Ivy the trappings of the cool suburban teen life she covets and captures the attention of wealthy, golden-boy Gideon Spyer. But when Ivy is sent to live with an aunt in China, the young romance is nipped in the bud. Years later, Ivy bumps into Gideon’s sister, Sylvia Spyer, and uses that friendship to reconnect with Gideon, and insert herself into their privileged orbit. But a ghost from the past appears in Sylvia’s boyfriend, Roux, who could destroy all Ivy has worked for.

Read about another entry on the list.

White Ivy is among Rebecca Kelley's nine titles featuring female villains who lean into their wickedness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Thomas F. Remington's "The Returns to Power"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Returns to Power: A Political Theory of Economic Inequality by Thomas F. Remington.

About the book, from the publisher:

An unconventional perspective on contemporary economic inequality in America and its dangers for democracy, using comparisons with Russia, China and Germany.

Since the economic liberalization wave that began in the late 1970s, inequality around the world has skyrocketed.

In The Returns to Power, Thomas F. Remington examines the rise of extreme economic inequality in the United States since the late 1970s by drawing comparisons to the effects of market reforms in transition countries such as Russia, China, and Germany. Employing an unconventional comparative framework, he brings together the latest scholarship in economics and political science and draws on Russian, Chinese, and German-language sources. As he shows, the US embraced deregulation and market-based solutions around the same time that China and Russia implemented major privatization and liberalization reforms. The long-term result was increasing inequality in all three nations. To illustrate why, Remington contrasts the effects of these policies with the postwar economic recovery program in Germany, which succeeded in protecting market competition within the framework of a social market economy that provides widely shared prosperity, high growth, and robust democracy. The book concludes with an analysis of the political dangers posed by high inequality and calls for a new public philosophy of liberal capitalism and liberal democracy that would restore political equality and inclusive growth by strengthening political and market competition, expanding the provision of public goods, and broadening social insurance protection.

An ambitious account of why political and economic inequality has increased so much in recent times, The Returns to Power's emphasis on policy variation across democracies also reminds us that it did not have to turn out this way.

Visit Thomas F. Remington's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Returns to Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Robards's "The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard: A Thriller by Kate Robards.

The entry begins:

Before I wrote The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard, I sketched out the characters in great depth. Some of my notes made it into the novel, while others were simply for me to create multi-dimensional characters. As part of my process, I located a photo depicting my vision of each character. While not a celebrity, looking back at the photos guides me in dreamcasting my novel.

My debut thriller follows Sawyer Stannard, who’s grappling with the unexpected death of her sister, Willa. To understand Willa’s last days, she begins to retrace her footsteps, diving deep into a mysterious cold case of a missing toddler that Willa, an investigative journalist, was writing about.

The novel alternates between Sawyer’s perspective in the present day and Willa’s point of view in the past, so I consider them both leading ladies. Despite sharing their childhoods, these sisters have very different personalities.

Sawyer is extraverted, enthusiastic, and bubbly. A spin instructor in her late twenties, she’s bounced from job to job. Though she intends to find out what happened to her sister, she’s not a detective; she’s a grieving sister battling her own demons. I’d cast...[read on]

Visit Kate Robards's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten sapphic love stories

Lily Lindon is a writer and editor living in London. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University, where she was involved with the Footlights comedy group. She was an Editor at Vintage, Penguin Random House, before joining the creative writing school The Novelry.

Her novels are Double Booked and My Own Worst Enemy.

At the Guardian Lindon tagged ten "books that affirm that Sapphic love can be one of life’s greatest pleasures." One title on the list:

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

McQuiston writes brilliant New Adult romantic comedies with punchy concepts, adorable characters and delightful dialogue and this is my absolute favourite. A month before high school graduation, the perfect principal’s daughter kisses three people and disappears, leaving behind pink letters with clues to her whereabouts. Her academic rival is determined to be the one who finds her – to prove she’s cleverer, of course, not because she’s secretly in love with her.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Zeynep K. Korkman's "Gendered Fortunes"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey by Zeynep K. Korkman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life. Criminalized by long-standing secularist laws and disdained by contemporary Islamist government, fortunetelling cafés proliferate in part because they offer shelter from the conservative secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and gender pressures of the public sphere. Korkman shows how fortunetelling is a form of affective labor through which its participants build intimate feminized publics in which they share and address their hopes and fears. Korkman uses feeling—which is how her interlocutors describe the divination process—as an analytic to view the shifting landscape of gendered vulnerability in Turkey. In so doing, Korkman foregrounds “feeling” as a feminist lens to explore how those who are pushed to the margins feel their way through oppressive landscapes to create new futures.

Follow Zeynep K. Korkman on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Gendered Fortunes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Katherine Lin's "You Can’t Stay Here Forever"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: You Can't Stay Here Forever: A Novel by Katherine Lin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Desperate to obliterate her past, a young widow flees California for the French Riviera in this compelling debut, a tale of loss, rebirth, modern friendship, and romance that blends Sally Rooney’s wryness and psychological insight with Emma Straub's gorgeous scene-setting and rich relationships.

Just days after her young, handsome husband dies in a car accident, Ellie Huang discovers that he had a mistress—one of her own colleagues at a prestigious San Francisco law firm. Acting on impulse—or is it grief? rage? Probably all three—Ellie cashes in Ian’s life insurance policy for an extended stay at the luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France. Accompanying her is her free-spirited best friend, Mable Chou.

Ellie hopes that the five-star resort on the French Riviera, with its stunning clientele and floral-scented cocktails, will be a heady escape from the real world. And at first it is. She and Mable meet an intriguing couple, Fauna and Robbie, and as their poolside chats roll into wine-soaked dinners, the four become increasingly intimate. But the sunlit getaway soon turns into a reckoning for Ellie, as long-simmering tensions and uncomfortable truths swirl to the surface.

Taking the reader from San Francisco to the gilded luxury of the south of France, You Can’t Stay Here Forever is a sharply funny and exciting debut that explores the slippery nature of marriage, the push and pull between friends, and the interplay of race and privilege, seen through the eyes of a young Asian American woman.

Visit Katherine Lin's website.

The Page 69 Test: You Can't Stay Here Forever.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about friendships in your 20s

Katherine Lin is an attorney and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School.

You Can’t Stay Here Forever is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven books that have

friendships that, even if begun in childhood, remained significant in the early years of adulthood. The books remind me of my own friendships in my 20s, the ways we did right by each other, and the ways we let each other down. They remind me of racing to happy hour, finding your friend already waiting for you at the bar, and then spending the rest of the night talking about the person you hope to be. They remind me of growing up.

One title on the list:

The Dead Are Gods by Eirinie Carson

In The Dead Are Gods, Carson writes about her friendship with her goddess-of-a-friend Larissa, who dies unexpectedly at 32. Best friends since childhood, they spend their explosive twenties by each other’s side, two strikingly beautiful models and roommates who were maybe, perhaps, behind on rent but could go out and stun any man in London into buying them dinner and drinks. Carson’s writing is spectacular and piercing, and The Dead Are Gods is a powerful meditation on agonizing, excruciating grief, an honest portrayal of the lives that are left behind when a friend suddenly dies.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Erin Raffety's "Families We Need"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care’s Resistance in Contemporary China by Erin Raffety.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state’s efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China’s modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making.

Follow Erin Raffety on Twitter and visit her website.

The Page 99 Test: Families We Need.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Christina Lynch reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Christina Lynch, author of Sally Brady's Italian Adventure.

The entry begins:

I have a large personal library, and always have an eclectic mix of reading material strewn over the bed and surrounding tabletops to suit varying moods and energy levels. The other night I stupidly left Mussolini’s Daughter by the indefatigable Caroline Moorehead on a low shelf and then found it partially shredded by my 11-month-old puppy. You can imagine the angry shrieking. Moorehead is a go-to source of research for my historical fiction projects, the latest of which is set in Venice in 1926. Apparently...[read on]

About Sally Brady's Italian Adventure, from the publisher:

What if you found yourself in the middle of a war armed only with lipstick and a sense of humor? Abandoned as a child in Los Angeles in 1931, dust bowl refugee Sally Brady convinces a Hollywood movie star to adopt her, and grows up to be an effervescent gossip columnist secretly satirizing Europe’s upper crust. By 1940 saucy Sally is conquering Fascist-era Rome with cheek and charm.

A good deed leaves Sally stranded in wartime Italy, brandishing a biting wit, a fake passport, and an elastic sense of right and wrong. To save her friends and find her way home through a land of besieged castles and villas, Sally must combat tragedy with comedy, tie up pompous bureaucrats in their own red tape, force the cruel to be kind, and unravel the mystery, weight, and meaning of family.

Heir to Odysseus’s wiles and Candide’s optimism, Sally Brady is a heroine for the 21st century.

Visit Christina Lynch's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Italian Party.

The Page 69 Test: The Italian Party.

Writers Read: Christina Lynch (April 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Sally Brady's Italian Adventure.

Writers Read: Christina Lynch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Marjorie McCown

From my Q&A with Marjorie McCown, author of Final Cut:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Final Cut is a great title for a couple of reasons (and let me start by saying I can't take the credit -- Madeline Rathle, the head publicist at Crooked Lane Books suggested it.) The story is a murder mystery set behind the scenes of a big budget Hollywood movie in production that's plagued by a string of disasters, starting on the first day of principal photography when key costumer Joey Jessop discovers the body of a murdered coworker on set. So Final Cut gives us the obvious film reference. But the actual sound of the title is sharp and snappy, and I think that provides readers with a subliminal cue that they're in for a fast-paced (that's the goal, anyway) plot-driven book. And there's also a slightly sinister overtone that can be read into those two words.

What's in a name?

The sound of a name carries its own particular energy, and I wanted...[read on]

Visit Marjorie McCown's website.

Q&A with Marjorie McCown.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books about missing persons

Una Mannion’s debut novel is A Crooked Tree.

Her new novel, Tell Me What I Am, is due out in the US in August 2023.

At the Guardian Mannion tagged ten books about missing persons -- "interrupted stories, in fiction and real life, [that] are powerfully moving and key into a universal anxiety." One title on the list:

Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan

In the summer of 2005, 18-year-old Kim Larsen vanishes on her way to work. Her Chevette is found several days later in a nearby town. O’Nan resists generic expectations, sidelining the thriller elements to offer a compassionate portrait of a family afraid to give up in the face of tragedy. Narrated alternately by Kim’s mother, father and 15-year-old sister, O’Nan shows us a different kind of procedural: endless waiting, spending nights on websites as her sister does, or taking pills to fall into unconsciousness like her mother. Perhaps the most devastating character is the father, desperately driving up and down highways distributing flyers, trying to keep his daughter in the public mind.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Songs for the Missing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Peter Thompson's "The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Visions of Chemical Modernity by Peter Thompson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Exploring the history of the gas mask in Germany from 1915 to the eve of the Second World War, Peter Thompson traces how chemical weapons and protective technologies like the gas mask produced new relationships to danger, risk, management and mastery in the modern age of mass destruction. Recounting the apocalyptic visions of chemical death that circulated in interwar Germany, he argues that while everyday encounters with the gas mask tended to exacerbate fears, the gas mask also came to symbolize debates about the development of military and chemical technologies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He underscores how the gas mask was tied into the creation of an exclusionary national community under the Nazis and the altered perception of environmental danger in the second half of the twentieth century. As this innovative new history shows, chemical warfare and protection technologies came to represent poignant visions of the German future.

Learn more about The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Amy Grace Loyd's "The Pain of Pleasure"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Pain of Pleasure by Amy Grace Loyd.

About the book, from the publisher:

Amy Grace Loyd’s atmospheric and erotic new novel traces the storms inside us, between us, and around us. Set in a headache clinic in the basement of an abandoned church in Brooklyn during unprecedented extremes of weather, it explores the intimate terrain of human pain and pleasure, how our bodies can collude with us and against us, mislead us all the way to addiction and emotional and sexual obsession.

The story is an increasingly fevered collision of perspectives: those of the Doctor, a man outrunning some ghosts but especially his own desires; Ruth, the nurse hired by the clinic’s domineering patron—Mrs. Adele Watson—to spy on the Doctor; and Sarah, a former patient, who has gone missing but left the Doctor a written account of her days before vanishing.

Sarah’s journal chronicles an affair she had with a married man, which she believed could solve not only her chronic pain but the loneliness it caused her. But nothing goes to plan, for her, for her dedicated doctor, or for Ruth, already in exile from everyone and everything she once knew. At once interior and expansive, timely and transcendent, The Pain of Pleasure is a charged, daring, and ultimately hopeful imagining of what we hold on to when the storms keep coming.

Visit Amy Grace Loyd's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Pain of Pleasure.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine novels featuring complex female friendships

Sian Gilbert was born in Bristol, UK. She studied history at the University of Warwick, before teaching at a comprehensive school in Birmingham for almost five years. She now lives in Cambridge with her partner.

Gilbert's new novel is She Started It.

At CrimeReads she tagged nine "novels encapsulate many different facets of female friendship, both positive and negative: loyalty, mentorship, laughter; obsession, jealousy, anger; and everything in between." One title on the list:

The Collective by Alison Gaylin

When is a female friend needed more than after a tragic event? The Collective is an excellent portrayal of how grief can isolate and swallow you whole. In the wake of her daughter’s murder, Camille Gardner has been consumed by nothing but the thought of revenge. She finds a group of women whose children were also killed, women who are equally out for vengeance. Men are strictly not allowed. This is a coming together of female pain, female frustration, and female rage. At first, Camille feels understood like never before. But as she entangles herself further and further into this secretive group, it becomes clear that getting out will be impossible without serious consequences. This is a story about being a mother, but it’s also a story about the intense bond between women who’ve experienced a shared tragedy—a bond that may be taken advantage of.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Collective.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Robin Waterfield's "Plato of Athens"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy by Robin Waterfield.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first ever biography of the founder of Western philosophy

Considered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. In his teens, he honed his intellect by attending lectures from the many thinkers who passed through Athens and toyed with the idea of writing poetry. He finally decided to go into politics, but became disillusioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his teacher, Socrates, to death. Instead, Plato turned to writing and teaching. He began teaching in his twenties and later founded the Academy, the world's first higher-educational research and teaching establishment. Eventually, he returned to practical politics and spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to create a constitution for Syracuse in Sicily that would reflect and perpetuate some of his political ideals. The attempts failed, and Plato's disappointment can be traced in some of his later political works.

In his lifetime and after, Plato was considered almost divine. Though a measure of his importance, this led to the invention of many tall tales about him-both by those who adored him and his detractors. In this first ever full-length portrait of Plato, Robin Waterfield steers a judicious course among these stories, debunking some while accepting the kernels of truth in others. He explains why Plato chose to write dialogues rather than treatises and gives an overview of the subject matter of all of Plato's books. Clearly and engagingly written throughout, Plato of Athens is the perfect introduction to the man and his work.

Visit Robin Waterfield's website.

The Page 99 Test: Taken at the Flood.

The Page 99 Test: The Making of a King.

The Page 99 Test: Plato of Athens.

--Marshal Zeringue