"More Than Fiends"

Maureen Child, who has written under several pseudonyms, including Ann Carberry, Sarah Hart and Kathleen Kane, has a new novel (published under her own name) out this month, More Than Fiends.

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

The Page 69 test was a revelation for me! I immediately went through the stacks of books I own and read page 69 in a dozen or so of them. Mostly, I have to say, they passed the test. Strange though, that a couple of my favorites didn’t!

Still, it’s an interesting experiment — and I applied it to my own newest release, More Than Fiends. I think it held up. In this book, Cassidy Burke has just found out that she’s a legendary Demon Duster. She’s also faced with the reappearance of Logan Miller, father of her daughter, Thea. He’s back in town and now that he knows about his child’s existence, he wants into their lives.

Page 69 gives readers an idea of Cassidy’s personality. And a peek into her relationship with Logan. It also showcases the fact that this is a first person, sort of snarky book with plenty of attitude. So, all in all, I think it passed the test!

Pg. 69:

Thanks,” he said as he followed me into the kitchen. “It does help.”

“Look,” I told him, pulling an extra coffee cup out of the cupboard and filling it for him, “I’m willing to work this out, because I’m a fabulous human being, but I’m only going to listen to you being mad for so long.”

“About sixteen years?” he asked, a reluctant smile curving one corner of his mouth.

“Ha-ha,” I said and handed him his coffee. “One more time, Logan. I was a kid. And pregnant, okay?”

He leaned back against the counter, holding the cup between his palms. “If I’d known, it would have been different,” he said. “Cassie, you wrote to me all that year and you never even mentioned it.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, taking a huge gulp of coffee, “like you never mentioned that you were dating Skippy.”

“Misty.”

“Whatever.” I set my cup down, walked to the service porch and Logan was only a step or two behind me. While I stuffed a load of towels — Thea used two for every shower, one for her hair, one for her body and took two showers a day, you do the math — Logan leaned against the dryer, watching me.

To be honest, he gave good stare.

He made me so jumpy, I dumped enough soap in to wash five loads and hoped that wouldn’t come back to bite me in the ass. Then I slammed the lid and looked up at him. Well over six feet, it took awhile to lift my gaze all the way to his eyes, but it was worth the trip.

“What do you want from me, Logan?”

He blew out a breath, crossed his feet at the ankle and said, “Another shot.”

“At what?”

“You.”

Whoa Baby!

Check out Maureen Child's website and her blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Volk's Game"

Brent Ghelfi applied the "page 69 test" to his debut thriller, Volk's Game, and reported the following:

The centerpiece of Volk’s Game is a long-lost Leonardo painting called Leda and the Swan, discovered hidden behind another painting in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. It is a treasure so transcendent that Volk will do almost anything to possess it. Together with a small team he breaks into the Hermitage through now-submerged catacombs built in the time of Peter the Great.

Those who crack open the book on page 69 will find themselves on the edge of an ancient loading dock beneath the Hermitage. Volk and his lover, Valya, have been betrayed. They’re trapped, waiting for the cover of darkness to make their escape, with only one air tank and only one way out — through fifty meters of frigid river water in a submerged tunnel.

Is this a good place to get a sense of the story? On one level, Volk’s Game can be read as a hard, fast thriller — an art heist gone bad, with all the craziness of modern-day Russia as a backdrop. On a different level it is a story about the search for something pure and good amid tragedy and evil. The scene that begins on page 69 implies both readings, and suggests what the treasure at the heart of the story truly is.

From page 69:

When my chronometer beeps midnight the next day, I strap the nearly exhausted air tank onto Valya’s back, hoping it will offer a few metallic breaths. Without a wetsuit, exposure will quickly drive the oxygen from her body, slowing her progress.

We swim out until the ceiling touches her hair. Her lips are teeth-chattering blue already. She presses them icily against mine. She clings. Her steel grey eyes look fiercely determined behind the glass of Kamil’s too-big facemask as we take several deep breaths. She nods. We dive and kick hard through the catacombs.

The first ten meters pass too slowly. She offers the mouthpiece and I suck greedily without getting much oxygen, and then push her on. She’s ahead of me, so I can’t see her face when the air in the tank gives out, but her frantic kicks and the burning in my own lungs tell me that it has happened. She paddles madly through the chute toward the upper tunnels. But she pulls up short with a jerk. I can’t see clearly through the murk, but she’s flailing wildly. Too many hand-scrabbling, mind-screaming seconds pass before I find that her tank is caught on the edge of the chute and yank it loose.

When she’s free again, she struggles furiously beside me, but I know it is a losing battle. Her limbs slow to a ponderous crawl. I grasp a strap. Pull, yank, drag. Our progress is far too slow. My lungs are on fire. The underwater world turns chalky grey. She’s dead weight within a few meters after we finally emerge from the chute.

I kick with everything I have left. Fifteen more meters to go to the air pocket I shared with Kamil. Too far. My lungs are a roaring furnace.

I kick frantically. Ten meters left. Darkness crawls the edges of my vision.

I can’t see. I’m not going to make it. Goddammit, be strong! My kicks morph into useless flutters. The murk becomes a swirl of prismatic colors. The water is peaceful, restful, warmly embracing …

Last year, at a table in Vadim’s café littered with stacks of used shot glasses and discarded vodka bottles, when Valya was still willing to entertain such questions, Nabi asked her why she used to sell herself for money. Our little party fell silent. I choked the neck of a Gzhelka bottle and considered busting open Nabi’s skull. But then Valya answered calmly, “Because I needed to eat.” She popped a stuffed olive into her mouth and smiled white-haired radiance around it as she chewed. “And I preferred fucking strangers over fucking my father and his brothers.”

For some reason that vignette plays repeating loops in my mind. When it stops, I realize that I’m floating faceup, staring without comprehension at channeled wet stone.

I’m still alive.

I turn my head. Next to me in the water is Valya. Her slicked-back hair and big eyes make her look like a hopeful seal.

“It was my turn to pull,” she says.

Check out the Volk's Game website and read Chapter One.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hard Man"

Allan Guthrie's first novel, Two-Way Split, was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger. His second novel, Kiss Her Goodbye, was nominated for Edgar, Anthony and Gumshoe awards.

He applied the "page 69 test" to his new novel, Hard Man, and reported the following:

Unfortunately, Hard Man fails the page 69 test, that page consisting solely of the section header GHOST DOG.

So let’s take a look at page 68 instead.

It starts:

“Wallace?” he said, then asked the craziest question: “Did you just shoot me?”

A little backstory to put this into context: The man who’s possibly just been shot is Roger Baxter, a young guy who’s ill-equipped for the situation life’s thrown at him. He’s big and muscular enough, but he’s not got a lot of bottle. Unlike his brother, Flash, who has a lot of bottle, but is a scrawny wee runt. Between them and their old dad, Jacob, they’re doing their best to keep their sister’s husband, Wallace, from harming her.

Wallace, you see, has a well-documented propensity for violence. He’s already beheaded the family dog. And threatened the Baxters with similar acts of violence. All because his wife is pregnant, and he’s not the father (I guess some people react badly to that kind of thing).

So we enter the scene on page 68 with Roger waking at two in the morning thinking he’s heard a noise in the kitchen. He checks it out. Finding no sign of an intruder, he pours himself a glass of water, and gets blindsided.

And that’s where we come in.

In fact, Roger hasn’t been shot. Not yet. That happens halfway down the page.

When the pain came, it was like nothing he’d ever experienced. At the same instant, a hundred mallets slammed into his kneecap. Pulverised it.

And then when it can’t get any worse, it does.

The second explosion followed quickly. The same blinding pain. This time, the other knee. Through the pain, the thought that he’d never walk again. Not caring, if only he could stop the pain.

Hard Man is a violent book. And this sums up the approach I’ve taken to it. Throughout, the violence is written primarily from the point of view of the victim, so, yep, there’s a lot of pain. Has to be said, if you’d rather your on-page violence doesn’t hurt, this probably isn’t the book for you.

Although there’s a lot of humour. Very black. And if anything’s atypical about this page, is that there’s not a laugh in sight.

But looking ahead, I see the next page makes up for that. I should have chosen page 70. Damn.

Visit Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals Website and the Hard Man blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Late Night Talking"

Leslie Schnur is the author of The Dog Walker and a new novel, Late Night Talking, to which she applied the "page 69 test" and then reported the following:

On page 69, the two most important characters in the book have interior moments, as one chapter ends and another begins. Nicholas Moss, a maverick entrepreneur, has just given a speech about personal responsibility at yet another high-ticket fundraiser and is rushing to the place he’d much prefer to be — sitting high in the canopy of a redwood tree on the Northern California Coast.

He looked out over the Pacific and breathed in deeply, his chest expanding with the cool, clean ocean air. He let it out and felt empty. Something was missing. He knew what it was, but he didn’t want to be dopey or sentimental. For crying out loud, he’d just said what he had to say at the dinner, he was buying a crack little radio station, his companies were flourishing, he had his friends, and here he was sitting in his favorite tree, his face against the wind.

But he had nobody to share it with…

And the new chapter, "The House on Allston Way," begins, this one from the point of view of my protagonist, Jeannie Sterling, host of the late-night talk show on rudeness, “Sterling Behavior”, whose surprise visit from her father brings up memories of childhood and her mother, who died many years before.

She stops a moment to look at the family photos on her wall, the ones she passes ten times a day and never really notices. And she is transported back in time to the difficult family life she had growing up in a commune in Berkeley in the 70’s.

The characters — their longings, their desires, their failings and failures — are what drive my book, and page 69 illustrates that. They tend to be a complicated, somewhat neurotic crew, with complex relationships and histories.

What page 69 doesn’t have is any dialogue, and my characters do talk … a lot. Nor does it reflect the humor of the novel, nor the wit of Jeannie’s late night talk radio show and the warmth of her friendship with her on-air cohort and best friend, Luce. This is a romantic comedy, for god’s sake! Will Jeannie make peace with her Dad? Will she find love? Will Moss find someone to share his tree-climbing life? The answers are probably evident, but for how’s and who’s, you’ll need to read the book!

Check out Leslie Schnur's website and read an excerpt from Late Night Talking.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Racial Culture"

Richard Thompson Ford is George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and author of Racial Culture: A Critique.

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

Page 69 is critical to the argument of the book, but the main themes of the book — race and multiculturalism — do not appear on page 69. In the book I argue against the attempt to use civil rights to protect "cultural practices" associated with racial and ethnic groups. I argue that this use of civil rights would reinforce racial stereotypes and social conformity within racial groups: I think, for instance, it's wrong to think of discouraging "black English" as a form of race discrimination because doing so reinforces the stereotype that failure to use standard diction and grammar is a natural attribute of the black race, rather than a result of poverty, poor schools, ghetto isolation, etc.

Page 69 makes a broader argument against the commonplace idea that legal rights are simple tools for liberation; there I argue that rights are actually means by which one branch of government — usually the courts — exercises power at the expense of another branch of government or at the expense of private actors, such as employers:

Any first year law student knows that First Amendment … forbids government from discriminating against either the content of expression or the teachings of a religion. Therefore, liberal constitutionalism concludes, First Amendment rights are ideologically neutral and enhance the freedom of the individual. But… [o]ne could argue that First Amendment rights serve to channel social activity, protest and unrest in a prescribed way, to institutionalize particular forms of expression (leafletting, marches, demonstrations and political advertising) at the expense of others (situationist pranks, civil disobedience, transgressive performances, shock art, obscene gestures.) We could say something similar about the religion clauses, pointing out that spirituality is protected to the exclusion of philosophy and politics — Aquinas is protected but not Thoreau — and therefore individuals and groups are encouraged, both by law and by the set of practices that law supports, to join churches and to embrace and present their commitments in a religious form.

None of this means rights are bad. But one must evaluate the use of power that occurs when rights are asserted and vindicated — it's not enough to justify them in terms of "freedom."

I build on this argument to make the more specific case against multicultural rights: this assertion of rights, if successful, wouldn’t simply leave members of minority groups free to engage in their cultural practices — it would also makes it harder for them or anyone else to resist the implication that certain cultural practices "belong" to certain racial groups; it would make it harder for people to criticize practices that are defined as "cultural" (consider the handwringing around female circumcision and how much more clarity we would bring to the issue it we simply asked whether or not the practice was child abuse — it turns out it usually is, but not always.) In these sense multicultural rights would not make anyone — not even members of minority groups — more free. Instead they would encourage some practices at the expense of others. I argue that many of the practices they would encourage are worse than those they would displace…

Learn more about Racial Culture from the Princeton University Press website and read an excerpt.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Protector"

Laurel Dewey applied the "page 69 test" to her new book, Protector, and reported the following:

My debut novel, Protector, has several interlocking themes. One of those deals with how a defining moment in one’s life shapes you for better or worse. For protagonist, Detective Jane Perry, her defining moment drives her entire life and, as the book unfolds, that violent moment makes her question whether she can fulfill her promise to protect a traumatized nine-year-old girl.

When I was invited to explore page 69 of Protector, I was stunned because that page deals with a conversation between Jane and her younger brother, Mike, about defining moments.

“Do you believe that everybody has a defining moment in their life? You know, something that alters the course of their existence? Something that turns them into a completely different person? And afterwards, nothing is ever the same. Is that possible?”

Jane felt an uncomfortable tremor in her belly. “We all have defining moments.”

“You think it’s possible to have more than one defining moment in your life?” Mike seemed to struggle with the concept but pressed on. “Like, do you think that you could have a defining moment when you were young and then have another moment that defines you all over again? Does that make sense?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. You’re giving me a headache. What’s all this about?”

Mike stared down at the napkin. “I’m not sure I can talk about it just yet.”

Jane leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

“I need to think about it some more.”

“Think about what? Come on, you always tell me everything.” Jane reached across the table and touched Mike’s hand. “Mike, talk to me. Whatever it is, I’ll fix it.”

Mike looked at his sister with a guarded eye. “I don’t think you can, Janie.”

This scene exemplifies Jane’s struggling heart. The first person Jane had to protect was Mike. Their father was a sadistic monster. Jane’s defining moment dealt with the choice she made at age 14 to deflect her father’s rage from her brother and suffer his brutality. In doing this, her life was forever changed. It was the beginning of her spiral into alcoholism and her regret that she didn’t kill her father at that moment. Now, his voice haunts her, making her question if she has the courage to pull the trigger against another abuser to save an innocent life. That defining moment is the fulcrum from which my character-driven novel builds its fire.

Visit Laurel Dewey's website and The 8th Sense blog, and read an excerpt from Protector.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Arab Economies in a Changing World"

Marcus Noland and Howard Pack applied the "page 69 test" to their new book, The Arab Economies in a Changing World, and reported the following:

Page 69 of our book consists in part of a chart showing the narrowing gap between female and male illiteracy in the Arab countries of the Middle East since 1970. No Osama bin Laden, no rich oil sheikhs. Just rising literacy, particularly for women and girls. Implicitly many children from poor families.

The chart is a microcosm of the region’s social, political, and economic trends with which we grapple in the book. Many of us carry the notion in our heads that Arab economic performance has been weak. Not so: over the last couple generations it has been worse than East Asia, better than sub-Saharan Africa — the most comparable in terms of arbitrary borders and weak states, and about the same as Latin America and South Asia. And while economic growth has not been stellar, on many other indicators that we document — female literacy or childhood immunization or life expectancy to name a few — improvements have been spectacular.

Yet evidence suggests that these demonstrable improvements in measurable outcomes have not translated into greater happiness or satisfaction. One possible reason is an absence of “voice”: while the region’s economic performance may not be distinctive, its combination of authoritarianism and political stability is unparalleled.

And though the Arab world has suffered no major economic crisis, it now faces a major challenge: the demographic imperative to create jobs for the large cohort of young people reaching working age. The stakes are high: rapid labor force growth in many Arab countries has contributed to despair among young people about their job prospects and consequent worries about political stability. It is not difficult to envision the region caught in a downward spiral where impoverishment, discontent, militancy, and repression feed upon one another, deterring reform and impeding growth.

Yet this is not the only possible future path. If the Arab world’s daunting employment challenge can be successfully addressed, the region’s demographics could turn from a potential liability to a valuable asset. Growing prosperity, confidence, and optimism about the future could underpin movement toward greater political openness and social tolerance. The recognition that neither of these alternatives can be excluded is both an antidote to despair and a call to action.

Learn more about The Arab Economies in a Changing World at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Keep it Real"

Bill Bryan is a film and television writer who admits to having "stolen vast sums from all of the major media companies: Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal, Disney, Sony, and Fox." He has written and produced many series, including the long-running comedies Night Court and Coach.

His new book is Keep It Real, to which he applied the "page 69 test" and reported the following:

I wouldn’t call page 69 of Keep It Real representative of the whole book – it’s not funny or active enough for that – but it is part of a key turning point, and it offers some insight into how I constructed the story. I knew I wanted to write a first-person comic mystery, with a down-on-his-luck journalist as the narrator. I found the plot by making a Nixon-style Enemies List – a catalog of all the things I hate about modern life. It got pretty long pretty fast, so I gave greater priority to those that seemed most ripe for ridicule. Reality TV and gangsta rap thus emerged as top contenders, and I thought about how I could bring them together, and shove ‘em down the throat of a guy who can’t stand either one. About ten minutes later, I had the essentials of Keep It Real: Ted Collins, the disgraced reporter, is forced to take a job as a reality TV producer. By chance, he witnesses a badass rapper beating and threatening his girlfriend, a smoking hot model. When she goes missing, Ted gets an idea for how he can use Reality to go after rap.

The transition is tricky and a bit complicated, and that’s why it wasn’t as fun or fast to write page 69 as most of the other ones in the book. But it was worth the effort, because mashing two scourges of contemporary culture together generated a lot of laughs – for me and I hope for you too.

Page 69 also happens to be where I go out of my way to piss off the three of the most powerful people in the entertainment business:

The unofficial bios of some of the biggest names around – David Geffen, Brian Grazer, and Steven Spielberg – feature stories of shameless fraud and impersonation used to advance their early careers.

So this whole book-writing thing better work out for me. Know what I mean?

Visit Bill Bryan's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"You're Not the Boss of Me"

Erika Schickel is the author of You're Not the Boss of Me, to which she applied the "page 69 test" and reported the following:

Page 69 in my book, You're Not the Boss of Me, is a good representation of the book as a whole. It falls in the middle of the essay "Tossing the Cookies" in which I attempt to bake some Christmas cookies for teacher gifts with my friend Rae. The idea was to bake a variety of traditional Christmas cookies and present them in little white boxes hand-decorated by our children. It's a half-baked plan both literally and figuratively - completely exceeding Rae's and my limited domestic skill set. (I am going to cheat a little and start the excerpt which begins on the bottom of page 68, where I pull a pan of "Dream Bars" out of the oven):

I looked down into the pan and was confronted by what looked like a 9" x 12" slab of joke vomit. Pieces of coconut floated in a shining, flesh-colored stew. It was clearly too wet to ever be a bar. "Well, maybe we need to cook it a little more?"

"Yeah?" My friend, usually so confident, so sure of herself, was clearly at a loss.

"Sure, let's put it back in the over and crank it," I said, faking authority.

Okay, that right there - bogus authority? Motherhood is built on that. You act like you know what you're doing, but really, you have no clue.

We finished the sugar-cookie batter, molded it into logs, and wrapped them in plastic. It felt good putting the wrapped dough in the fridge to harden, like putting money in the bank.

"Damn, we're good!" I proclaimed. That's when we smelled smoke.

"The Dream Bars!" Rae yelped. We yanked them out of the oven to find they had darkened to the color of old scabs. The coconut flakes were singed and smoking.

"They're done," I declared.

"Gee, you think? deadpanned Rae.

Here's another key point: you must have funny friends, or this job will kill you.

Rae is a recurring character in my book because she is everywhere in my life. She just gets it and will never for a moment bullshit me about anything. She is Ethel to my Lucy (though of course she would say I'm Ethel to her Lucy).

I think it was then we began to realize we were out of our depth. Our training was in liberal arts, not the womanly arts. But we were in too deep to quit, so we trudged on to the grim business of mixing up the Fudgy Nuttty Drop Cookies.

Okay, here is an issue that totally rubs my guff: the loss of the Home Economics class. I never had one because they were seen as archaic and sexist by the 1970's and were phased out of the school curriculum. But in trying to liberate us girls, they hobbled us. Because let's face it, motherhood is a domestic job. As long as girls continue to grow up to have babies, they are going need a little cooking and sewing game.

When a recipe says, "Prep time: 20 minutes, "that is assuming you know what you're doing. It also assumes you have bought sweet butter, not salted, and don't have to make yet another trip to the grocery store. The checkout girl [who we met on the first grocery run on page 68] greeted me like an old friend.

"Still baking?" she asked sympathetically.

"Yep," was my terse reply.

You imagine your life with kids as a seamless symphony of teachable moments, tender caresses, a beautiful, spontaneous exercise in creativity - when really it's about going to the supermarket over and over and over again.

I return to find my home in chaos. The kids had lost interest in the gift boxes and Rae was surveying the crafting wreckage strewn out on the dining room table. The kids hadn't exactly drawn designs with the glitter glue. Rather they had simply squeezed great glops of glue on to the tops of the boxes and smeared the puddles with their fingers. Little, shining stars floated in a thick mucus that dripped down the sides.

Okay, I cheated again and let the 'graph end on p.70 - but you get the picture. It's a big, ugly mess, and there is just so much that situation that is funny to me. The story ends with us just completely breaking down in helpless, hysterical laughter.

I love the mess and the mishaps of motherhood (and personhood) and I really believe our humanity is found in our flaws. So I try to describe my own so that other people can recognize themselves and we can all take a deep breath and relax. It's okay! We're all a bunch of fuckups! And we're raising kids! So I write to let myself and everyone else like me off the hook. That, and I like to write. I really loved writing this book. It was a survival tactic to get me through early motherhood and it worked.

Visit Erika Schickel's website and read an adapted excerpt from You're Not the Boss of Me.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Salty"

Mark Haskell Smith's new novel is Salty.

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

For obvious reasons I wish that page 69 of Salty featured some mouth on genital action. How cool would that be? Even better if the characters were actually doing a “69” on page 69. Or is that too meta? But in my new novel there’s not a mention of oral sex until page 2, and then not a real description of a character in “the act” until page 159.

So what happens on page 69?

It’s a half page, at the end of a chapter.

“I apologize.”

He walked back to his spot on the floor and sat down. He refilled his bourbon and lit another cigarette. Sheila watched him. She could sense that he was suddenly troubled by something.

“Where are you from?”

“The United States.”

“But there are black people, brown people, in your country. Not everyone is white like you.”

Sheila nodded.

“My mother was from Denmark. My father is Norwegian.”

Somporn considered that for a moment as the water in the shower slowed to a trickle and stopped. Sheila grabbed a towel – a nice one too, pilfered from a four-star hotel – and began to dry herself. Somporn was watching her, entranced, and yet she could tell that his thoughts were elsewhere. Finally he spoke.

“Scandinavia.”

He said it like it was a magical word.

My novels are about, among other things, what constitutes identity. In Salty, a fading rock star and his supermodel wife, Sheila, are jolted out of their pampered and privileged universe by Sheila’s kidnapping. As the story unfolds they discover several truths about themselves, their marriage, and the nature of monogamy. It is a journey of self-discovery, although I’m not sure Dr. Phil would approve.

In the scene on page 69, Sheila has taken a shower with her abductor, the Thai pirate Captain Somporn, watching her. She is exposed, vulnerable, and scared, yet Somporn’s reaction to her nudity – and in particular to her alabaster skin – disarms her. The seeds of a nascent and kinky Stockholm Syndrome are planted. And for Captain Somporn, well, he has just discovered that he is deeply and erotically moved by the sight of her pale skin – the color of raw squid - a fetish he didn’t know he had.

Learn more about Salty at the author's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"When the Press Fails"

When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, is now out from the University of Chicago Press.

The authors applied the "page 69 test" to their study reported the following:

The page 69 test works fairly well with our study of the news media and political power. Page 69, focusing on how anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was able to grab media attention in the summer of 2005, offers an intriguing portal into the larger argument of the book.

The larger argument is that the news media are profoundly dependent upon government spin and the governmental “flywheel” of legislative debates, congressional investigations, etc. for their daily coverage of policy issues. We argue — and a mound of academic research also indicates — that mainstream journalism has abdicated the responsibility of raising and sustaining (especially sustaining) critical questions about U.S. foreign policy. In short, if Congress, administration officials, and/or military leaders do not raise alarms, the media are unlikely to do so, even when knowledgeable critical voices exist. The run-up to the Iraq war and on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal offer pointed examples in which the media largely reported the Bush administration’s claims without sustained critical evaluation. (Bill Moyers’ recent documentary, Buying the War, illustrated the same dynamics).

Cindy Sheehan’s ability to temporarily command mainstream media attention is an exception that proves the rule. Sheehan gained momentary prominence in the national news with the help of an experienced public relations team (including Joe Trippi of Howard Dean fame), a (rare) lull in administration-generated news, and the sheer luck of good timing. As we say on p. 69 (well, starting on p. 68 to be exact):

Cindy Sheehan entered the news as the embodiment of an entire anti-war movement in the summer of 2005. It helped, of course, that she operated with the kinds of conditions that favor outsiders making the news: summer is the slow news season, the President was at his ranch on vacation, the press contingent hovering around the president had little news to report, and suddenly there was a dramatic story with the potential for episodic developments camped right outside the ranch.

In other words, Cindy’s 15 minutes of fame illustrates well why we call the mainstream media the “semi-independent press.”

Learn more about When the Press Fails at the publisher's website, and read an excerpt from the book.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Virgin's Guide to Mexico"

Eric B. Martin is the author of the novels Luck and Winners, which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award.

His new novel is The Virgin's Guide to Mexico, to which he applied the "page 69 test" and then reported the following:

Page 69 is the eye of the storm.

By the time we get there, our young heroine — Alma Price, age 17, Texas runaway — has been humiliated, hunted, nearly raped. She’s disguised herself as a boy, survived Mexican cops and whorehouses, been unmasked by a transvestite, spoken with ghosts.

Soon she will be in Mexico City, racing through lost cities in the subway, facing down private eyes in the rock n’ roll market, snorting cocaine with the big city literati. Soon her parents will tangle with wild pigs and peyote lords, rich kids and street vendors, as they try to bring her back.

But right now: calm. The air is hot and still. The hunt for her roots — her father’s Texan, her mother’s Mexican, but never spoke about her past — has brought her here, to a little town called Bustamonte.

There is a moment in every chase when the pursued and the pursuer come to rest. They stop moving, and look around, and in that moment all the ordinary colors of the world pulse with unexpected life. The small beauty of existence comes briefly clear. Happiness seems possible, even assured. There is a moment in every chase where the pursued and the pursuer realize that they have found what they were looking for, but it’s not what they expected, and the great machinery of desire is still in motion, and the chase must go on.

Alma might be disguised as a boy; she might be looking for her grandfather; she might be searching for an identity she’s never had as a rich, Harvard-bound girl from Austin, Texas. But for right here, right now, at this family barbeque where a random hitchhiked ride has landed her, Alma is content:

Family stories flow. What would if be like to have a history of one thousand relatives from both sides of the border who all knew each other’s names and faults and business? For all Alma knows they’re out there. Not in the burnt out shell of Nuevo but in the elephantine heart of Mexico. This could be mine, she thinks.

Meeting the family, huh? Lalo and Cristobal materialize when her new friends disappear.

Everyone’s really nice,

Cristobal snorts and snores. Dull ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Man’s jealous, Lalo confides. He leans in close and Alma breathes in at least fifty hours of consecutive beer. Always wanted to fuck our cousins.

They say cousins fair game now, says Cristobal.

Mexico ever said otherwise? They who?

Scientists.

Yeah, well. Too late, What is that, a Coke?

Yep, says Alma.

That’s what I mean, Cristobal complains, he’s over with the Coke and baby crowd.

With a flick of his wrist, Lalo produces a beer like a magician’s dove. Emborráchate, kid. They clink bottles and he watches until he takes a shallow altar sip. That’s better.

And then the chase goes on.

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--Marshal Zeringue