"The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner"

Patricia Vigderman, author of The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, applied the "page 69 test" to her book and reported the following:

The book begins “I know a few things about Isabella Stewart Gardner, but it’s hard to feel really close to her.” It’s about a famous place -- the Boston museum she built (practically with her own hands), filled with personally selected artworks, and decreed could never be altered. It’s about my quest to feel at ease with imperious Isabella -- to let her live in imagination. It became a kind of anti-biography, tracking down Mrs. Gardner in Gilded Age Boston and in her museum.

Page 69 finds me entangled with a less conspicuous figure in her social world: William Sturgis Bigelow (Boston Brahmins generally seem to have had three names). What struck me was his long relationship with Japan, with Japanese art and spiritual life. In the decades after the Civil War, despite the remarkable discomforts of travel, wealthy Bostonians packed their flea powder, endured horrible seasickness, and went off to be dazzled and enlightened and entertained by the foreign world of the Far East. And they brought stuff back: in Bigelow’s case, thousands of objects for the newly established Museum of Fine Arts.

In fact Bigelow and Isabella Gardner had a terrible falling out over how people are supposed to look at art, so since he turns up on page 69 I’ll say that the question of what exactly we are doing when we look at art is perplexing and compelling to me. Art comes to us out of the foreign world of the vanished past as if time and change were meaningless. In the book I keep wandering through the museum, rediscovering it over and over. I look at how some contemporary artists have responded to its unchanging vision, and finally (despite Isabella’s decree) I arrange it for myself, in language.

...the contrast between Fenollosa's escape from Mrs. Gardner's Boston and his friend Bigelow's choice not to suggests how the chill of tradition discouraged alternatives... He was Clover Adams's favorite cousin, although (once again) there are no letters between them left for our curious eyes. The letters of his that do remain show him as playful and self-assured; his favorite expression when declining an invitation was "my heart is a handful of dust." He studied medicine at Harvard and in Paris, but did not follow the medical profession, as his father (himself a prominent physician, and, in fact, the Gardners's family doctor) desired. With his considerable fortune he supported a well-known Wagnerian opera star, but never married her. (“…please report me of sound & disposing mind to my father, if you see him,” he wrote to Phillips Brooks in 1889. “He does not take any stock in Buddhism, & thinks that I am hovering on the verge of lunacy, because I do not come home & get up some grandchildren for him, like a well-regulated Bostonian.”)

In Japan he was not only an adherent of Esoteric Buddhism; he provided financial assistance to impoverished artists, gave $10,000 toward the establishment of the Fine Arts Academy in Japan, and made donations for the repair and conservation of temples. His own collection ran to 4,000 paintings and 50,000 prints and drawings. I think he was an idealist and an aesthete, and also a pure product of his city and class. Henry Adams described him to a friend as mistakenly seeking Paradise rather than the Fireside, although as things fell out, when his father died in 1890 he inherited a couple of firesides -- two fine houses, plus an island off Nantucket -- as well as trusteeships of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

The point I go on to make is that Bigelow’s adventurousness and gaiety hardened in the end -- he became the old guard -- while Isabella’s did not. Into old age she remained lively and slightly scandalous.

Patricia Vigderman's recent writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Northwest Review, Raritan, Seneca Review, and Southwest Review. She divides her year between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches in the English department at Kenyon College.

Learn more about The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner, and read an excerpt, at the publisher's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Declaration of Independence"

David Armitage is Professor of History at Harvard University.

He applied the "page 69 test" to his most recent book, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, and reported the following:

The Declaration of Independence: A Global History takes a very familiar document, the American Declaration of 1776, and asks three less familiar questions about it: What were the international pressures that forced a Declaration in 1776? What did people outside the United States make of it after 1776? And what impact has it had on other declarations of independence around the world since 1776?

Pg. 69 is right at the heart of this short book. It moves from answering the first question to tackling the second. It notes that major changes in ideas about international relations and international law were taking place right around 1776 -- indeed, the very word "international" was only coined in 1780 -- and that these changes decisively shaped the way the Declaration was read at the time. It also starts telling how quickly the Declaration travelled from America to Europe in the summer of 1776: news of independence had reached Warsaw barely two months after July 4th. The page therefore nicely illustrates up two major concerns of the book: to show that this very American document was in fact quite cosmopolitan, and to follow its remarkable fortunes outside America over the past two centuries.

Learn more about The Declaration of Independence: A Global History and read an excerpt.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Invisible Cure"

Helen Epstein writes frequently on public health for various publications, including The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Magazine. She is currently a visiting research scholar at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.

She applied the "page 69 test" to her new book, The Invisible Cure: Africa, The West and the Fight Against AIDS, and reported the following:

The HIV epidemic in East and Southern Africa is uniquely severe. Half of all new cases of HIV occur in this region, home to less then 3% of the world’s population. The Invisible Cure: Africa, The West and the Fight Against AIDS suggests that this probably has something to do with sexual behavior. It is not that African people have so many sexual partners, but that they are more likely than people in other world regions to have more than one — perhaps two or three — ongoing sexual relationships at a time. Epidemiologists have shown that this pattern of behavior gives rise to a network of sexual partnerships that serves as a “superhighway” for HIV.

In the pages preceding page 69, I learn from a group of young Maasai men that this pattern of behavior has a powerful social, economic and historical basis, not only for the Maasai, but, as I will learn later on, for other groups as well. On page 69, I am asking the Maasai youths about abstinence and fidelity and then I prepare to conduct a condom demonstration for them. However, their responses make it clear why these behavioral changes are difficult for them. The book then goes on to discuss what kinds of HIV prevention programs have been attempted in Africa. I find that where HIV prevention has worked, the success depended crucially upon something for which the field of public health currently has no name or program. It is best described as a social movement, based on a sense of solidarity, compassion or mutual aid that is impossible to quantify or measure.

Learn more about The Invisible Cure at the publisher's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Grammar Lessons"

Michele Morano is an assistant professor of English at DePaul University and the author of essays that have appeared in journals and anthologies that include Best American Essays 2006, the Georgia Review, the Missouri Review, Under the Sun, and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction.

Her new book, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, was published last month.

She applied the "page 69 test" to it and reported the following:

I’ll admit I was skeptical of the Page 69 Test, especially since it takes me to an essay called “On Climbing Peña Ubiña,” which I don’t think of as representative of the collection as a whole. And yet, when I look more carefully at what’s happening on that page, I have to admit that it does contain a lot of the thematic and emotional elements of the rest of the book. The scene is this: during a year when I was living and teaching in Spain, I went on a mountain climbing trip with a university group. The climb was much more difficult – and dangerous – than anyone expected, and it took twice as long as we’d planned. So on our way back down the mountain, we decided to save time by “sledding” on our backs:

Two by two, people line up and take off until everyone has gone except Jose and me. “This will be great,” we reassure each other, waiting until the people below us are clear of our path. I’m trying to summon my courage, to lie down and let gravity take me where it wishes. I want to prove to myself that I’m as brave as I’d like to be, as fearless and secure as I was just three weeks ago. And Jose may be trying to do the same, to let go of what he suspects and I’ll soon learn: that Yolanda’s trip to England is the beginning of the end for them. Like me, Jose may be taking deep breaths and trying to keep the panic at bay, reconciling himself to a future in which he might have only himself to rely on.

We lie down at the same time and shove off. It’s a great ride, although my cloth jacket slows me some, and when I finally reach the bottom, my clothes – right down to the underwear – are soaked through. But I feel exhilarated. We all do. We’re wet but not too cold, and we start talking about the bottles of bourbon back at the lodge and the sidra, hard cider, waiting at the bar in the town below. We hurry through the long, sloping meadows, egging each other on until someone suggests that we try running downhill, leaning back to maintain our center of gravity. What’s the worst that can happen? someone shouts, and now it’s Enrique who cautions us to slow down and be careful.

This scene laces the seductive pleasure of living in Spain with the underlying sorrows that, for me at least, often shade the most memorable travel experiences. So in one sense, I guess it does offer readers a sense of what to expect from the rest of the collection.

I’ve heard that Wayne Booth used to instruct his students to pay attention to what was happening exactly halfway through a piece of literature. When I apply that principle and go to the middle page of my book, I’m happier than when I go to Page 69. Might there be a Middle Page Test?

Learn more about Grammar Lessons at Morano's official website.

Read Morano's entry at the "Writers Read" blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ladykiller"

Lawrence Light and Meredith Anthony applied the "page 69 test" to their new book, Ladykiller, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Ladykiller contains one piece of the puzzle. A series of murders has shaken New York City. Up to now, all the victims have been women and there have been no clues, no common ground, no intersection in the lives of the very different victims. In the latest killing, the victim is a man, a social worker. Is it a copycat? Has the killer made a mistake? Is this killing the key to solving the riddle of the series? Detective Dave Dillon of the NYPD is routinely questioning residents in a building near one of the series of killings. Most of the people he’s talked to saw and heard nothing. This time it’s different.

Page 69:

"What the hell do you want?"

Dave jolted into alertness. A sour old man, all lips and eyes, had answered his knock. Dave's father would have said, "The last face I saw that ugly had a hook in it."

"Police, Mr. Tucker. We wonder if you--?"

"About time you got here. I been dialing 911 all day. They keep saying someone will be over. Busy wolfing down doughnuts, weren't you?"

Dave wasn't surprised that he hadn't heard about Tucker calling 911. They were too busy with genuine emergencies to relay tips in a timely fashion. "Sorry, sir. I've been trying to get to you." Dave attempted an apologetic grin.

"There were three of them."

"I beg your pardon."

"Three of them on the street last night. I don't sleep good, nights. Never have. My wife, when she was alive, said it was because I had a guilty conscience. What have I got to be guilty about? People don't like me, I say, 'Fuck'em.' Always have."

"What did you see, Mr. Tucker?"

"We're on the seventh floor now, remember." He led Dave to the window and pointed down to the taped-off murder scene diagonally across the street and down a building. "That's a ways down to the street. And my eyes aren't as good as they used to be, especially at night. When I was working, I managed an office. Used to be able to spot something wrong with someone desks and desks away. Old Eagle-Eye Tucker, they called me. I straightened them all out. If they didn't like it, fuck 'em."

Dave nodded. "What did you see, sir?"

"Three people. One hit the other one, knocked him down. The one hit ran off, yelling. I couldn't hear what. The other two seemed to be talking. I figured this was some drug deal. Then there's this flash of light and a gunshot. Took me a moment to understand. The guy with the fists was shot."

Two persons involved in the slaying of Reuben Silver? "Could you identify any of them? Maybe pick out some kind of distinguishing characteristics?"

Read the publisher's description of Ladykiller.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Glorious Defeat"

Timothy Henderson is Distinguished Research Associate Professor of History at Auburn University Montgomery.

He applied the "page 69 test" to his new book, A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States, and reported the following:

Page 69 appears in a chapter titled “The Problem of Texas,” in a section detailing Mexico’s “Law of April 6, 1830.” That law was Mexico’s most serious attempt to stave off the loss of its northern state of Texas, which since the 1820s had been rapidly filling with gringos who were showing considerable signs of unruliness. The law contained provisions that hoped to encourage non-U.S. immigration to Texas, to integrate Texas economically with Mexico, to outlaw slavery in the state, and to prohibit further immigration from the United States. Page 69 contains a portion of the explanation for why this effort failed dismally, leading inexorably to Mexico’s loss of Texas.

The loss of Texas wounded Mexican national pride in a way that made future compromise with the Texans or the Americans politically impossible. As such it was a key event leading to the 1846-1848 war with the United States. A Glorious Defeat attempts to explain the reasons for Mexico’s entry into that war. The political turmoil and the many frustrations that Mexico experienced between 1821 and 1846 — frustrations such as the inability to hold on to Texas — go a long way toward explaining why the Mexicans declined several opportunities to avoid war, even though it was clear to most realistic Mexican leaders that a war with the United States was not winnable. Page 69, then, does indeed contain a key component of that story.

Read more about A Glorious Defeat.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Here She Lies"

Kate Pepper is the author of Five Days in Summer (2004), Seven Minutes to Noon (2005), One Cold Night (2006), and, coming in May, Here She Lies.

She applied the "page 69 test" to Here She Lies and reported the following:

As it happens, by chance, page 69 of Here She Lies is one of this novel’s pages that I hold most dear. It’s one of the pages I re-tooled over and over to make sure it expressed exactly what I wanted it to say. It’s a page whose existence I fought for during the editorial process, when some might have curtailed it. Page 69 is where I consciously and deliberately encapsulated the societal issue that is at the core of what plagues my protagonist, Annie.

Annie is a victim of identity theft, and as an electronically plugged-in shopoholic she has laid herself bare to cyber thieves. As it happens, her identical twin sister, Julie, is a marketing guru. Page 69 shows them together, passing through a pretty gentrified country town, soon before she discovers that her identity has been stolen. In this scene, she feels a vague awareness of her role in the dance between buyer and seller without yet realizing just how vulnerable it will leave her.

Main Street was busy with shops, boutiques, galleries and restaurants; the town center was more polished and inviting than I’d expected. Unlike the strip malls I had grown used to down south with their utilitarian chain stores, this was the kind of place where you might like to walk and browse. I was an unabashed shopoholic — prime feed for marketers like my twin, advertisers, telephone solicitors, the whole bunch of them — and in light of our conversation on the way into town I began to feel supremely stupid sitting in my sister’s leather passenger seat. Her keen awareness of the workings of the world, her mastery of it, afforded her leather while our car back in Lexington was upholstered in stained cloth. I wondered if it was possible that everything I did, half of what I thought, was influenced by someone else and I didn’t even know it. After all, in recent years the marketing of stuff had grown more ubiquitous and even sexier than the stuff itself. Were we offered what we wanted before we knew we wanted it? Were our own lurking desires being used to formulate and transform our wants into needs? I considered this as we drove ten more minutes along Route 7, the lush, hilly road that led into Stockbridge.

Stockbridge was another jewel of a New England town in a prosperous area; it had its own Main Street, similar to Great Barrington’s, but it felt different in a way I couldn’t put my finger on at first. Then, when we passed a sign pointing in the direction of the Norman Rockwell Museum, I knew what it was. I remembered Rockwell’s classic mid-century painting of this very street: a lineup of brick and whitewashed storefronts on a cold winter night at Christmastime, a serene and pastoral small-town moment anyone could recognize in his or her own way. His painting had become an American icon, reminding us of the simplicity and peacefulness of our national soul back when existence was organic, not just the food but people’s daily lives.

But the town I saw didn’t look or feel like the painting. Around the lynchpin of a huge Victorian hotel were all the signs of a tourist trap gone to seed: a candle shoppe, a candy shoppe, a store featuring sweatshirts advertising the names of local towns and attractions, a crowded eatery. It looked to me like the painting’s fame had driven the town around the bend, devouring the innocence that had brought it acclaim in the first place.

Was this — this sweet but faded town — what marketing left you with after the sale? A vague memory that you had once valued something but you could no longer recall precisely what it was because you had, almost inadvertently, replaced it with something else. It was cynical, I knew that, but there was something about this place, these scenic, almost staged towns and roads and flowerbeds and skies that made me want to scratch their pretty surfaces to see what really was beneath. I liked it here but none of it felt precisely real.

Visit Kate Pepper's website and her blog, and listen to her read an excerpt from Here She Lies.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Why Casey Had To Die"

L.C. Hayden applied the "page 69 test" to her Agatha-nominated novel, Why Casey Had to Die: A Harry Bronson Mystery, and reported the following:

I bow my head in shame. I gave my latest release, Why Casey Had To Die, the Page 69 test and I flunked. If a reader were to open the book to Page 69 and read only that page, the essence of the book would bypass him.

Ellery Queen Magazine wrote about me and Casey: “... her knack for gripping the reader is undeniable.” This page tends to set up the suspense that’s going to follow rather than thrust the reader in that web of suspense.

The only tiny part of suspense that might grab the reader appears on the last five lines of the page. Bronson, my detective, has learned that the so-called fictional murder puzzle that the attendees of a mystery convention are supposed to solve is actually a real cold case. In fact, it is Bronson’s first unsolved case.

Bronson asks one of the conference attendees if any of the previous fictional murder cases has ever been set in Texas. The last three lines read:

Katherine shook her head. “Not that I can remember. Far as I know, they all
have been set here in Arizona.”

“Then why the change this year?”

Hopefully, the reader will want to turn the page and find the answer. It is, after all, the backbone to the suspense that will send Bronson down a path filled with terror — one that places not only him in mortal danger, but also his beloved wife, Carol.

Check out the author's website to learn more about Why Casey Had To Die and to read an excerpt.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lāhaina Noon"

Eric Paul Shaffer lives in Kula, on Maui, on the sunset slope of Haleakala. He is author of several books and a chapbook of poetry, two chapbooks of fiction, and non-fiction articles and reviews.

He applied the "page 69 test" to his fifth book, Lāhaina Noon, and reported the following:

“Ka Mahina O Hoku Ma Haleakalā” appears on page 69 of Lāhaina Noon, a book about sun, night and stars, sea and shore, mountains, and moments of illumination.

Living on an island two thousand miles from everywhere else underscores how small and how large the world is, and no place was more isolated than Hawai‘i when the planes stopped flying on September 11, 2001.

The sudden silence awakened me to the true magnitude of the planet, and at that moment in history, my friend Andrew and I hiked at night into Haleakalä crater.

Descending into the volcano broadened my sense of time and place, and every step carried me further into a world darker and forever changed on a planet beautiful but always indifferent to us.

Ka Mahina O Hoku Ma Haleakalā

It's a landscape barely terrestrial--sere, barren, stark.
A full moon blazes white through darkness rising
from my feet. This landscape lives by its own light,

a light of dust that silvers where it settles. In silence,
we descend. It's a landscape that barely allows
our passage. We're not alone. ‘Ua‘u call from the cliff,

voices of shadow the moonlight rips from raw rock.
It's a landscape that lives in light of stars piercing
shadows after centuries of marking the darkness.

Beyond the moon, far suns glitter like ice in oil.
Descending to the crater, my companion disappears,
though I hear his tread echo above or below me.

The crater floor glows, now reflecting light reflected
from the sun, a light reflected in my skin darkened
by sun and moon, silver in the night, this skin spun

from a dust of stars. I say nothing. This landscape
swallows words. On the trail, thoughts loom large
as the moon. It's a landscape that gladdens me:

When I'm gone, the moon will light the volcano,
the ice will come, the world will not change at all,
but for those little changes we mistake for time.

NOTES: On the Hawaiian calendar, every phase of the moon has a name, and Hoku is the night of the full moon. Haleakalā, “House of the Sun,” is the active volcano (10,023 feet) constituting East Maui, where I live. Thus, the title of the poem translates as “Night of the Full Moon in the House of the Sun.” ‘Ua‘u is the endangered Dark-Rumped Petrel, whose Hawaiian name mimics perfectly their forlorn cries.

Visit the publisher's website to learn more about Lāhaina Noon.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The New Golden Age"

Ravi Batra is the author of Greenspan's Fraud as well as the international bestsellers as The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism, The Great Depression of 1990, and The Myth of Free Trade. He is professor of economics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

He applied the "page 69 test" to his new book, The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos, and reported the following:

My latest work, The New Golden Age, is partly based on my past writings, especially those in the 1970s, when I wrote two books in which I made the following forecasts:

* The ayatollahs would take over Iran in 1979 and then rule for a while.
* The Soviet Communism would vanish by the end of the century.
* The United States would be entangled in a major fight with fundamentalist Islam starting around 2000.

Because of the far-fetched nature of these forecasts, my books, one entitled, The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism, and the other called, Muslim Civilization, attracted little attention. By now these forecasts have come true, and my new book, The New Golden Age, predicts that monopoly capitalism is next to fall.

I base my forecasts on economic and historical cycles. According to an economic cycle we are currently in the midst of an inflationary decade with a high and rising price of oil. My historical cycle concludes that the age of acquisitors, where money rules society, is about to end in America and Europe. This cycle also predicts that China, where the rule of money or of wealthy feudalist landlords ended in 1949, is about to move into its own golden age. History reveals that the age of the wealthy always ends in a social revolution followed by a golden age.

The single most worrisome global economic problem today is the U.S. housing bubble that has been primarily financed by foreign money. When the American bubble bursts by mid-2007 and continues to splinter thereafter, foreign investors will head for the exits; while it is in the self-interest of foreign governments to finance the U.S. trade deficit, private groups have no such interest or obligation. The bursting of the U.S. bubble will result in loan defaults and could start a foreign stampede out of American assets, leading to a collapse of the dollar, which in turn will cause American stock, bond, and real estate markets to crash by 2010, the year the revolution is likely to begin in America. That will then have a ripple effect around the world.

Some excerpts from pages 69 and 70.

“In spite of major differences in their inherent qualities, all classes make roughly equal contributions to the well-being of society. Without the warriors there would be no law and order, without the intellectuals there would be no conceptualization of human rights, liberty and justice, without acquisitors the economy would be in a poor state and without laborers there would not be much production. Every good person is crucial to social welfare, and every bad person is ultimately a societal parasite regardless of their innate qualities and achievements.

Once certain intellectuals discover that hoarding money and starting a business are keys to social prestige and political influence, they quickly learn the art of entrepreneurship from the acquisitors, and with their superior intellect eventually come to dominate the arteries of government. That is when the engine of exploitation runs full speed. This is because the intellectual acquisitor combines in one brain the cunning of the bad intellectual and the greed of the acquisitor.

Social Revolution

The salient feature of the era of intellectual acquisitors is that the ruling elite amass wealth but make people believe that such an endeavor is good for society. For instance, they cut taxes for themselves while raising taxes for other classes, and yet are able to convince the public that such economic policies are in society’s best interest. Or they may persuade you that God has blessed them with opulence so that they can take care of the indigent. They have the intellect to make you feel better even as they hit you, at least for a while. Dogmas proliferate at this point, and the laborer bears the maximum burden of exploitation.

Once the majority of intellectuals become acquisitive, materialism degenerates into super-materialism. There are no more religious or ethical restraints on the avarice of the elite, and as the public follows its leaders, everything gets commercialized.

There comes a point when intellectual acquisitors are virtually unchallenged; that's when the process of wealth concentration runs full throttle, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at incredible speeds. The boundless greed and hypocrisy of acquisitive intellectuals ultimately torments the majority of people. Salaries go down, and the bulk of society is forced to devote much of its time to making money. Warriors and intellectuals then have to become laborers because they have little time left for the finer pursuits of life. They have to labor hard to support themselves and their children. The intellectual’s inherent love for art, music, painting and philosophy gives way to routine work all day long to provide the means for family survival. The warrior’s innate predilection for adventure and sport is replaced by overtime work to make ends meet. The vast majority of society comes to adopt the laborers’ way of living and thinking.

[At times such as these, people overthrow the rule of money in society, as they did during Feudalism in Europe. Then comes a golden age.]”

Visit the publisher's website to learn more about The New Golden Age.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lost Dog"

Bill Cameron's debut mystery is Lost Dog, to which he applied the "page 69 test" and reported the following:

Lost Dog begins in two places: first, in the mind of one man hiding a dead body in a park, then in the mind of another, Peter, who finds it. Struggling with his own demons in the face of his discovery, Peter pisses off police assigned to the case, sees his emotional outburst featured on the television news, and draws the attention of Darla, daughter of the victim. He agrees to meet with Darla to discuss her mother's death, but the conversation doesn't go well, and by page 69, it's over.

“Wait,” he said. “How do I get in touch with you?”

[Darla] smiled grimly through her tears. “What the hell makes you think you’ll want to get in touch with me?” She shook her head. “You’ll be glad you got rid of me so easy. Just give it a few minutes.”

She walked out the door. He half-stood and watched her through the glass. She headed around the corner of the building and disappeared. He settled back into his chair and sat staring at his empty Danish plate, at his full coffee mug. Should’ve called Mulvaney. Just not made of tough enough stuff to deal with this. Jesus Christ.

This moment in the novel a microcosm of so much which is going on in Lost Dog. It's a moment when Peter's ambivalence about the situation stands in stark contrast to the decisions he made to put himself there. He's both attracted to and repelled by the killing, by the police, by the reaction of Darla. His connection to the death is coincidental, but his continued involvement is a product of his own compulsions. In the end, he'll have to come to terms with those compulsions if he is to survive.

Read an excerpt from Lost Dog and visit Cameron's website where you can view a video trailer for the novel.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"More Sex is Safer Sex"

Steven E. Landsburg is Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester and the author, most recently, of More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.

He applied the "page 69 test" to his book and reported the following:

Page 69 of my new book, More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics, reads, in its entirety:

"Part II: How to Fix Everything"

The answer is to encourage innovation and create better incentives. Innovation includes ideas like "Hey! I wonder if we could make computer chips out of silicon!" but it also includes ideas like "Hey! I wonder if we could finance start-ups with junk bonds!". You can fly from New York to Tokyo partly because somebody figured out how to build an airplane and partly because somebody figured out how to insure it.

With that in mind, I've offered a series of proposals to improve the incentives of innovators and regulators, congressmen and presidents, firefighters and police officers, jurors and judges. For congressmen: I want to give every voter two votes in each congressional election: You'd cast one in your own district and one in the district of your choice. That way, when the senior senator from West Virginia diverts billions of other people's dollars to his home state, those other people will have a chance to let him know how they feel. For regulators: FDA drug approvals currently take too long; they'd come faster if we required the commissioners to hold a portfolio of pharmaceutical stocks. For jurors: If you vote for acquittal, you've got to let the defendant share your house for a month.

Even the lighthearted proposals have a serious point. Jurors currently have very little incentive to deliberate conscientiously; we really ought to be thinking about ways to change that. In the book, I offer some more detailed and serious suggestions.

The general theme of More Sex is Safer Sex is that economic logic can lead to surprising conclusions, and surprises are fun. Some of the best surprises arise from the conflict between your own interests and the interests of your neighbors. Factory owners dump too much pollution because they don't care about their neighbors. The recklessly promiscuous spread disease because they don't care about their partners. And the demurely chaste *also* contribute to the spread of disease, by failing to enter the partner pool, even though they'd improve its average quality.

In each case, the incentives are wrong. Pollution should be taxed, reckless promiscuity should be taxed, and a modest increase in sexual activity among the cautious should be subsidized. It's all a matter of getting the incentives right.

Visit the author's website and read an excerpt from More Sex is Safer Sex.

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

--Marshal Zeringue