The Page 99 Test

A few weeks ago I received an email from Marshal Zeringue, who runs several literary blogs including one that’s called “The Page 99 Test.” Its title comes from Ford Madox Ford, who once advised, “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” I did not know Zeringue and still don’t, aside from several emails we subsequently exchanged, and I hadn’t heard of The Page 99 Test (Ford Madox Ford’s or Zeringue’s webby version). But Zeringue asked me to perform the test on Crude World and write a few words about whether and why I passed (hopefully) or failed (hopefully not). It was one of the curiouser book-related things I was asked to do in the past month, so I did it and enjoyed it and gave myself a passing grade (fairly earned, I think). Click here to read my test.

Other Maassapalooza items–
–Green Inc., the New York Times energy blog, has published a two-part interview with me. Here’s Part 1, here’s Part 2.
–I guest-blogged at the website for Joe Berlinger’s oil documentary, Crude.
–Oxfam America published a nice review of Crude World on their website.
–Tehelka, a magazine in Delhi that a friend in India described to me as “the closest thing there is here to the old Nation/Atlantic,” published an interview with me.

Author: Peter Maass

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.