Microcosm Publishing’s Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified U.S. History got a great review from the Village Voice.
From the review: “Hoerger and Partlow’s innovative method makes sense on many levels. Millions of pages of declassified docs can’t readily be sifted through, the authors’ logic goes, so an efficient way to track the federal government’s inner workings is to look at a specific cultural institution — food — as an angle. This offbeat approach winds up working damned well in a little more than 100 easy-to-read pages, creating a sort of hybrid between Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.”
The first guidebook from the fine folks at Post-Car Press, Post-Car Adventuring: San Francisco Bay Area, was featured in this week’s East Bay Express.
From the article: “Each index-card-size, pull-out page aids readers in getting from their home anywhere in the Bay Area to the front door, so to speak, of wherever they’re headed—and that means using trains, buses, and bikes with equal abandon. … ‘One of our main goals is reducing the number of cars that are in the city,’ Eichenlaub explained. ‘At the end of the day, the carbon emission savings are useful, but they’re not as useful to us as the social costs and personal costs in an urban environment.’ Fewer cars make the city a more livable place, reduce traffic and accidents, and open up the streets to pedestrians and bicyclists, he said.”
And Jila Ghomeshi, author of Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language (Arbeiter Ring Publishing), recently discussed her book on CBC Radio’s Weekend Morning Show! Listen here.
According to Ghomeshi: “The main thing that I want to stress is that those qualities that we impute to people who use non-standard grammar, like they’re lazy or they’re uneducated, are problematic because there isn’t something lazy about using non-standard grammar … I don’t want to say we don’t need standard English and I don’t want to say that that’s not important for many reasons, but those particular reasons that are given—when someone says ‘this person is speaking poorly, badly, incorrectly because it’s not clear, logical, and precise,’ I wanted to present, actually, linguistic arguments for why that’s problematic.”
Don’t they all sound good? We thought so! Nice work, publishers…keep ‘em coming!
