"The House the Rockefellers Built"

Robert F. Dalzell is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College, and is the author of Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made and Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism. Lee Baldwin Dalzell was for many years the head of the Reference Department at the Williams College Library.

They applied the Page 69 Test to their new book, The House the Rockefellers Built: A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America, and reported the following:

Page 69 of our book, The House the Rockefellers Built, deals with an emerging dispute between the house’s architects, Delano & Aldrich, and John D. Rockefeller Jr, who had been chosen by his father to manage the construction of the house. Beneath that disagreement, however, lay a deeper difference of opinion between the two Rockefellers themselves. “Senior” wanted a quite simple house built and had so instructed the house’s architects. His son, however, had something much more ambitious in mind, a house that would embody the finest traditions of Western, classical architecture. That difference of opinion, in turn, went to the heart of the much larger issue of how to reposition the Rockefeller family and its vast fortune in the twentieth century. In the end “Junior” emerged victorious on all fronts, his father having been persuaded to accept his vision, both of the house and the family’s destiny. The particular significance of Kykuit in this situation was that it marked the point of departure for the younger Rockefeller in his battle to overcome his father’s will and attitudes.

Read an excerpt and more about The House the Rockefellers Built at the publisher's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Jew Standing"

Michael Simon, a former actor, playwright, and Texas probation officer, is the author of four thrillers, including Dirty Sally, Body Scissors, and Little Faith.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his newest thriller, The Last Jew Standing, and reported the following:

The Page 69 Test sounds a little racier than it is. In this case, it captures a taste of one element of my book, that is, the detection element. My novels are thrillers, so they’re more focused on what’s happening now and what’s about to happen, then they are on what happened in the past. But because my main character is a homicide detective, (in fact, the only Jewish, New York Mafia-born homicide detective in the Austin Police Department), a certain amount of detecting is necessary to tell the story.

Here, Dan is on the phone with an FBI agent from Dan’s home town of Elmira, New York, a town described by some as the buckle of the rust belt. Dan is trying to hide how much he knows about the murder, not least that the murderer’s car was stolen by Dan’s own father.

I enjoyed this challenge, but the test that authors are subjected to more often is the infamous Page 1 Test. If agents, editors, or readers don’t like page 1, they won’t go on to page 2.

Page 69 in its entirety:

He explained, “Social services moves them in, leaves them for twenty-eight days and transfers them out. So they do in the hotel whatever they would do on the street. But Berelman wasn’t there through social services. He checked in on his own. And one night, maybe a week or so ago, he choked on the exhaust pipe. Maybe he tried to swallow it, or maybe someone went into a psychotic rage and rammed it down his throat. So I took the exhaust pipe and showed it around, went to a muffler shop and had the guy match it to the car it was from. Dead end because it was just a rusted piece of pipe. We finally found the rest of it sitting in the hotel parking lot. Whoever killed Berelman must have gone to the Allerton looking for him, then found the pipe in the parking lot and picked it up on impulse and brought it inside.”

“And no one witnessed any of this?”

“Fair question. I knocked on every door. There seemed to be an epidemic of amnesia and temporary blindness. Even the clerk said he didn’t see anyone unusual enter or leave the building that night, which is possible. If their usual is crackheads, hookers and pimps, there might not be much that would qualify as unusual. Or the clerk could have been distracted, or stoned. But the building had other points of entry, so whoever came and went could have bypassed the lobby altogether.”

I asked, “Was he a pimp?”

“Interesting question,” Hayden commented. “What made you ask that?”

What made me ask that? I said, “Who knows? Little guy goes into the business, sells women, sells drugs. Steps on someone else’s toes, doesn’t even know it, winds up dead in a hotel.”

“Interesting theory,” he said. “I’ll follow up on it.”

“Great.” A pause made me think he was done and the call was over. “Well, thanks.”

“No problem. Oh, by the way, Reles. Where are you from?”

Bingo. He was on to me. I tried to rewind the tape and figure out if I’d committed any crime of omission. “Elmira, New York,” I said, mustering up something that sounded like pride.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

I took a moment. “I thought you knew.” Then, “You did, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes.”

Read an excerpt from The Last Jew Standing, and learn more about Michael Simon and his books at his website and his MySpace page.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sperm Counts"

Lisa Jean Moore is Coordinator of Gender Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at Purchase College, SUNY.

She applied the "Page 69 Test" to Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man's Most Precious Fluid and reported the following:

I began my sociological investigation into sperm and semen when, as a graduate student, I conducted a study on the promotional literature and donor catalogs of American sperm banks. It was fascinating to me to explore how men were ranked through the consumption of their semen for reproductive purposes. I continued different types of research projects over the past decade that each had some seminal component, for example, conducting in-depth with sex workers and analyzing transcripts from crime shows and visual representations in hardcore pornography. I have also been a board member for The Sperm Bank of California. As a mother or two children conceived through donor insemination, I also interweave my personal experiences of using semen with a more analytic interpretation of men and boys and the rituals of masculinity through science, technology and biomedicine.

P69 is about how children's books create personalities for sperm cells and how this is potentially limiting to a child's understanding of reproduction. It is one of the arguments of the book but not necessarily the best page to adequately sum up the merits of the book. However it might indeed encourage certain readers to pick up the book as it is my vision of what children's books should do in order to be more open about the story of reproduction and less sexist about how we understand the operation of cells.

Read more about Sperm Counts at the New York University Press website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Law of Dreams"

Peter Behrens' collection of short stories, Night Driving, was published in 1987. His stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Brick, Best Canadian Stories, Best Canadian Essays, the Atlantic Monthly, and many anthologies. After his first story published in the US appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and was optioned in Hollywood he began to work as a professional screenwriter.

He applied the "Page 69 Test" to The Law of Dreams, his first novel, and reported the following:

Page 69. Well, it's a good test page for The Law of Dreams because it is a crucial scene. My protagonist Fergus, an Irish teenager (teenager was a concept not yet invented in 1846, but he is 15), has fled from the workhouse and set off for god knows where (his sense of geography is very limited; he's not exactly sure he lives in a country called Ireland; has hardly heard of Dublin). The law of dreams is, keep moving. He has stowed away on a wagonload of brand-new, empty, pine coffins (a bustling trade at the height of the Famine). It's the middle of the night on a bleak icy stretch of road in bogland, when the wagon is halted by a gang of would-be highwaymen, calling themselves the "Bog Boys," who are mostly children led by a girl dressed as a boy -- a former milkmaid -- calling herself Luke. The Bog Boys would like to think of themselves as a rebel gang but they are really confused orphan children led by Luke and Shamie, a young deserter from the British Army. They are "living rough" in the bog, feasting on stolen sheep and rabbits and birds' eggs and boiled nettles.

Luke asks Fergus to join them, and he thinks about it and agrees.

Luke is one of three girls in the story who are essential to Fergus' survival, to the development of his ability to feel a passionate erotic connectedness with life; a fierce desire to stay in life, not leave it.

While Luke is trying to persuade Fergus of the glamor and romance of the highwayman's life, the younger Bog Boys are "houghing," that is, using a thorn to opening a vein on the wagon horse's neck, and lick the blood for nourishment.

The scene was inspired by a line in a report written by a rural policeman to his superintendents in Dublin, during the Famine era: "Lawless children are infesting the highways."

It gave me a vision that Ireland in 1846-47 probably wasn't so different from Sierra Leone in the 1990s or Ethiopia or, now, Darfur. Any society breaking down, through famine or civil war, when orphaned children are cast away and forced to live outside the law, must band together to stay alive.

Nowadays, in East Africa, those outlaw rebel kids carry AK-47s; that's about the only difference I can see to what was happening in western Ireland in 1846/47.

Visit Peter Behrens' website and read an excerpt from The Law of Dreams.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Still Summer"

Jacquelyn Mitchard's novels include The Most Wanted, A Theory of Relativity, Twelve Times Blessed, The Breakdown Lane, Cage of Stars, and The Deep End of the Ocean, the first novel selected for the book club made famous by the TV host Oprah Winfrey.

Still Summer, her new novel, is about four friends who ruled the school twenty years ago gathering for an idyllic sailing vacation. Instead, after two days at sea, a single small mistake turns paradise a sun-baked hell.

Mitchard applied the "Page 69 Test" to the new book and reported the following:

On page 69 of Still Summer, Cammie Kyle explains why she feels it's almost her destiny to drive her mother crazy. Lenny Amato advises the girl to cut loose after college and stop being such a goody girl -- as it's obviously a source of resentment. In this context, he mentions his first mate, Michel, whose flirtation with Cammie on 'The Opus' will lead to disaster. He tells tales of the sea, of its amazing peace and power, of the horrible and yet awe-inspiring moments when the kindly mother ocean turns into a punishing madwoman. All of these elements that Lenny describes will shortly comprise his doom; and all the key elements of the story -- Cammie's relationships, Lenny's confidence and the women's friendships -- come together in what is shortly to a be harrowing race to survive. And they are all ready to combust.

Read more about Still Summer at Mitchard's website and at the Still Summer MySpace page.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fleeing Hitler"

Hanna Diamond is Senior Lecturer in French History and European Politics at the University of Bath. Her new book is Fleeing Hitler: France 1940, to which she applied the "Page 69 Test" and reported the following:

I was a bit taken aback when p.69 of Fleeing Hitler turned out to be an illustration which takes up the entire page. However, on reflection, I decided that this photo of peasant carts beautifully captures the main themes of the book. We can sense the slow progress made by these huge farm horses and the enormity of the efforts these people were making to distance themselves from the battle zone represented by the abandoned tank in the foreground of the picture.

This flight of French civilians from Hitler’s invading armies in 1940 reached monumental proportions and affected both those in rural and urban areas. Totally unaware of what lay ahead of them, people loaded up as much of their worldly possessions as they could carry or push along in prams and wheelbarrows or whatever they could find to enable them to leave their homes. As we can see, peasants piled their carts with all sorts of goods, including mattresses, furniture, cooking utensils as well as livestock. They tended to be much better prepared for this traumatic journey. By contrast, Parisians were ill equipped, having set out in inappropriate clothes and with little in the way of supplies as they had imagined that they would be able to buy food and petrol in the normal way. Towns in the south and west were swamped by the arrival of thousands of refugees from the capital and surrounding areas in addition to those who were already on the roads from Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and the north of France. Shops soon emptied. People struggled to get enough to eat and to find adequate shelter; most were forced to sleep rough. Many were machine gunned down by the German planes and families became separated from each other in the chaos.

What would become of them? Why did these people leave the safety of their homes? Where did they go? What would be the consequences of the largest displacement of population Europe had seen since the middle Ages? I believe that the p.69 test holds good for my book. If you are intrigued by this photo and the scene it portrays, you can learn more about this previously untold story of the civilian experience of May-June 1940 in France.

Read more about Fleeing Hitler at the Oxford University Press website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Secret Service"

Mitch Silver is the author of In Secret Service, his debut novel which blends historical facts and figures with a fictional espionage plot.

He applied the "Page 69 Test" to In Secret Service and reported the following:

I've just had a chance to re-read Page 69 of In Secret Service and, yes, it's pretty representative of my book. It seems to be written in English and, as far as I know, the rest of the novel is, too.

The one little kink is, my book is really a dual story: Half is the secret manuscript called Provenance that Ian Fleming has written for posterity; and half is the story of the woman who opens this dangerous time capsule -- Amy Greenberg, an Associate Professor of Art History at Yale. As soon as she does, Amy finds bad guys coming out of the woodwork to get at her and her precious cargo. Page 69 is one of the modern pages about Amy; if you had chosen Page 68 for your blog, we would have heard my Ian Fleming character describing the somewhat twisted love life of Wallis Simpson before she became the Duchess of Windsor. And before she had her afternoon tryst in Kitzbuhel with Ian Fleming (my Page 83).

Page 69 also could have been (but isn't) one of the pages with showing one of the 30 or so historical documents woven into my story, from a picture of Hitler receiving the Windsors at Berchtesgaden to Rudolf Hess' dental records to a particularly incriminating note (written in German) on the Duke of Windsor's notepaper.

Still, it has Amy musing on how to counterfeit an illuminated manuscript like The Book of Kells, so yes, I'd have to say it's fairly representative.

Read an excerpt and learn more about In Secret Service at the official website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Four Seasons in Rome"

Anthony Doerr is the author of three books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World.

He applied the "Page 69 Test" to Four Seasons in Rome and reported the following:

Page 69 of Four Seasons starts with the words, “St. Peter’s altar” and ends with “Caligula.” In between, I puzzle over eighteen-hundred-year-old columns, the fourth-century Baths of Diocletian (a 32-acre bathing complex that included libraries, gyms, theaters, and, of course, plunge baths of every temperature), the color of ancient statuaries, and the Palazzo Farnese, a high Renaissance palace that took 74 years to build. Here are three paragraphs:

This city swirls with stories — the deeper into the library stacks you go, the more stories pile up around you. One pope’s nephew beats another pope’s nephew at cards in 1485 and the winnings finance the construction of the Cancelleria, a 3-story palace just off the Campo dei Fiori that is the size of a city block. Can this possibly be true? Does it matter?

Here’s something you can spend a day considering: At least 220 plaster flowers the size of patio tables hang from the underside of Michelangelo’s cornice of the Palazzo Farnese, staring down at whoever cares to look up. Not one of these flowers is the same as any other. How long would something like that take?

Here’s something else: most of the ancient temples, monuments, and statues were originally painted. The color of classical Rome was not chalky white but electric blue, strawberry blond, sunshine yellow: a seven-year-old’s coloring book, magenta temples, violet skies.

Is page 69 representative of the entire book? In one sense, it is. It’s certainly representative of Rome; the way, in a single block, whole centuries are heaped atop one another, apocrypha swirling invisibly in every doorway. On page 69, we move from St. Peter to Caligula in the space of 13 sentences, and that’s precisely how I’d feel when I’d walk down a street in Rome: I was constantly tripping backwards through time. What I try to suggest on this page, and elsewhere in the book, is that the more you learn about Italy’s capital city, the more bewildering and fascinating it becomes.

Read an excerpt from Four Seasons in Rome, and learn more about the book at Doerr's website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"China's Brave New World"

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

He applied the "Page 69 Test" to his latest book, China's Brave New World — And Other Tales for Global Times, and reported the following:

Most of the “tales” in my book were inspired by trips I took. Page 69, though, comes in a rare chapter devoted to journeys taken by others. In addition, most chapters focus on the present or the very recent past. But page 69 comes in one titled “Around the World with Grant and Li,” which looks back to the 1870s. So, in two basic ways, page 69 is far from representative.

Still, in two other ways, reading it gives the reader an accurate sense of China’s Brave New World. The first representative feature relates to content. A recurring theme in the book is links between China and America, and page 69 refers to the time in 1876 when Ulysses S. Grant (who would soon, after his presidency ended, take a trip around the world) met Li Gui (a Chinese man midway through circumnavigating the globe). And as readers learn from an earlier page, General Grant and Mr. Li encountered one another at a World’s Fair that was held in an American city (Philadelphia) and included an exhibit from China that, according to one guidebook, made visitors feel they “had suddenly landed in some large Chinese bazaar.”

The other thing at least fairly representative about page 69 is its whimsical tone. It is rare for a professor of history to be described as writing in a playful manner, but in China’s Brave New World, I often do just that.

The top of page 69 concludes a series of fanciful speculations about what Grant and Li might have talked about (battles, for example, as the latter’s life had also been changed by a civil war) in 1876. (The historical record tells us that they met at a fairground reception, but not what — if anything — they said to each other.) Then, building upon my earlier quotation of a favorite line by Henry James — which differentiates between the historian (“who wants more documents than he can really use”) and the dramatist (who “only wants more liberties than he can really take”) — page 69 continues as follows:

In the end, there might be so much that a dramatist as opposed to a historian would want to do with Li and Grant that limiting their contact to a single meeting, even one with a lot of conversation, would begin to feel too constricting. Why not, one might wonder, take a very big liberty, while still remaining within the realm of the possible if not the provable or even the probable, and imagine that Grant and Li saw each other a second time, when the General stopped in Shanghai? Li Gui was back in China by then and working nearby in Ningbo, so there is no reason why it could not have happened, even if there is not a single shred of evidence that it did.

A dramatist imagining the dialogue for such a reunion on the other side of the world from Philadelphia could have a field day, as there would be so many things for the two men to talk about…

Read more about Wasserstrom's China's Brave New World — And Other Tales for Global Times.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nightmare in Napa"

Paul LaRosa is an Emmy Award-winning producer for the CBS newsmagazine 48 Hours. He won a Primetime Emmy for the acclaimed CBS documentary 9/11, and has also won a Peabody Award, a Christopher Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. For sixteen years he was reporter for the New York Daily News, where he was the co-winner with Anna Quindlen of the Meyer Berger Award given by Columbia University's School of Journalism.

LaRosa is the author of Tacoma Confidential and Nightmare in Napa, to which he applied the "Page 69 Test" and reported the following:

“A collective gasp filled the room.”

That’s the first sentence of page 69 of my non-fiction book Nightmare in Napa so I guess I feel pretty lucky. I think that’s a pretty darned good start for the page but let’s continue.

“No one could believe what they were hearing and before anyone asked the question, the human resources woman said, ‘Leslie was murdered along with her roommate last night by someone who broke into their house. We really don’t know anything else.’”

That paragraph basically sums up the story of my book. Two young women killed in their home and no one knows who did it. In my mind, it’s like an Agatha Christie mystery and we (you and me, dear reader) are going to solve this crime together. I think as a reader, if I were subscribing to the Page 69 test, I would probably buy the book at this point.

The rest of the page goes on to talk about how Leslie got her job at the Niebaum-Coppola winery and how well-liked she was. Now here is another interesting tidbit on that page – the famous Coppola name, as in Francis Ford Coppola. He owns the winery where Leslie worked and in fact the two had met each other on several occasions. Everyone is interested in the Godfather of the Godfather movies, aren’t they? Here you know you’re going to get at least some information about what it was like to work at the famous man’s winery which is, by the way, one of the most beautiful tasting rooms in all of Napa.

On this page, you also find out a bunch more about Leslie, how sociable she was and how she formed a small posse with women her own age.

In this case, this page works very well to whet one’s appetite for the rest of the book, I think.

Read an excerpt from Nightmare in Napa and learn more about the book at Paul LaRosa's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Inglorious"

Joanna Kavenna's first book, The Ice Museum, was short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize. Her writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the International Herald Tribune, among other publications.

She applied the "Page 69 Test" to her new novel, Inglorious, and reported the following:

By p 69 of Inglorious my protagonist Rosa Lane has left her job and her relationship and embarked on a mock-heroic quest for meaning in her life. Rosa is 35, and her mother has recently died. This causes her to question some of her assumptions. Her job as a journalist, which has supplied her with a sense of purpose for over a decade, seems suddenly inexplicable; she finds she can no longer produce confident opinions, elegant phrases. She realises she knows very little about anything.

By p 69 some months have passed since Rosa left her job and relationship, and she is really out on a limb. She has fallen into debt, and is trying to find work, while living in a borrowed room in North-West London. She undergoes a daily series of minor trials, all part of her comical mock-quest for meaning: she roams around London, seeing the city anew after all these years, meeting contemporary gorgons and battling miniature demons.

On p 69, she is describing a visit she recently made to a doctor, Dr Kamen. She goes to see the doctor in the hope that her malaise might have a physical cause, which can be cured with medicine, but the doctor disappoints her. He tells her she is not physically unwell. He asks her to tell him what she is feeling, and so on p 69 Rosa is trying to explain that she is troubled by an ‘unseen impediment’, some ‘basic fact. Or conjunction of facts. Perhaps not even facts, just things. And then some days,’ she adds, ‘I think that maybe this is what I’m trying to get to, this fact – or facts, this thing – or things – that would explain everything.’

The doctor doesn’t really understand. He tells her not to fret so much, that her prince will come. He assumes that she is simply questing for love. This causes Rosa to retreat, aware that he has judged and misunderstood her, that he can supply no answers.

P 69 points up some of the concerns of Inglorious: Rosa’s sense of the mingled seriousness and absurdity of her quest, her self-consciousness, her sense that people like her are simply not meant to trouble the stream, are rather meant to go into work and be obedient. It also displays Rosa’s fears that revelations will not be forthcoming, that she will fail in her mock-quest.

P 69 also suggests how Rosa is constantly told to stop making a fuss, to get a grip. I thought this might be a likely response to a young woman who acts in this way. I felt there was a chance she would be told to buck up, to stop being self-indulgent. Rosa, who feels violently ill at ease in modern consumerist society, and yet can find no alternative, is sent into exile, but no one finds anything heroic or admirable in this exile. Everyone she encounters sees her as merely perverse, or confused, and advises her to submit to normality, the rules of her society.

Read an excerpt from Inglorious and more at Joanna Kavenna's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Tin Roof Blowdown"

James Lee Burke, a rare winner of two Edgar Awards, is the author of over twenty novels, including such New York Times bestsellers as Bitterroot, Purple Cane Road, Cimarron Rose, Jolie Blon's Bounce, and Dixie City Jam.

Invited to apply the "Page 69 Test" to his new novel The Tin Roof Blowdown, Burke weighed in with the following:

The Tin Roof Blowdown is probably my best work. I write a novel or a story as well as I can and I don't look back on it later. Kerouac once said that every piece of writing is a work of art if the writer gives it his best. He went on to say that it's best the reader make the determination about the book's success or lack of it, and the writer shouldn't have a say in things once the work is completed.

I was a great admirer of Kerouac and always felt that his career and life were a tragedy. But regardless of the afflictions he may have suffered, he left behind one quote that will always remain with me. He was drunk in a bar in Lowell, Massachusetts, when out of nowhere he said to an old friend of mine*, "Your art is the Holy Ghost blowing through your soul."

In my opinion, Jack said it all right there.

[*His name was Bruce Cook, a really fine fellow and gentleman of the old school. He had great reverence for Kerouac's work and wrote some of the best criticism on it.--JLB]

Visit James Lee Burke's website and read an excerpt from The Tin Roof Blowdown.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue