McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

The Guardian reviews The Slow Food Story by Geoff Andrews

  978-0-7735-3478-0   August 2008

"Convivium" is the term for a local chapter of the international slow food movement: a nod to conviviality, and also perhaps a reminder that our word "company" comes from the words for "together" and "bread". Andrews's history of slow food is a thoughtful account of how politics came back to eating, from 1970s Italy and California to present-day Ludlow and further afield. The slogan "slow food", he notes, was born after a 1986 anti-McDonald's demo in Rome, but the roots stretch further back, at least to the legendary early-70s California restaurant Chez Panisse, where, we are told, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie played in the kitchen. Today slow fooders see eating as "an agricultural act". Against the charge that it is "elitist" to nag poor people about buying cheap supermarket food, Andrews argues that only slow fooders really care about the growers, and that only such a wide-angle view of food, from field to table, is politically and ecologically respectable. Nodding, I savoured my organic biscuits more carefully than usual.

Reviewed by Steven Poole, The Guardian, Saturday November 29 2008

Muse: The Voice of Canada's Museum Community reviews Beyond Wilderness by O'brien and White

  978-0-7735-3244-1     September 2007

Beyond Wilderness: The Group of seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art.

John O'Brian and Peter White's Beyond Wilderness is a volume of essays that deconstructs the myths surrounding the famed Group of Seven and such proxy artists as Tom Thompson and Emily Carr.  This book is more than a study of art history as it examines what so many galleries and museums ought to: the inseperable connections between history, the conditions of contemporary life, and the art produced as a result of the two.

'Policing the Banks' by Maartje Van Putten

New from McGill-Queen’s University Press

Policing the Banks
Accountability Mechanisms for the Financial Sector
By Maartje Van Putten

“Remarkable and pioneering.”
Peter H. Sand, University of Munich

“Frank and candid, with exceptionally informative quotes from officials inside and outside of the World Bank.”
Robert Goodland, Enviromental Advisor,
World Bank Group, 1978-2001

 

In store date – 15 December 2008

“This book is about the opportunities that citizens of the globe today have to express their problems and protect their rights when foreign direct investment of the financial world impacts upon their lives.” Maartje Van Putten

From 1999 to 2004 Maartje van Putten served as a member of the World Bank's Inspection Panel. Using personal experience and extensive interviews with principal decision-makers and stakeholders in the Panel's work, she chronicles the history of accountability in the World Bank and other major financial entities.

Describing how formerly secretive financial institutions have been slow to accept responsibility for the consequences of their investments - especially the problems that can result from projects in developing countries - she shows that financing institutions can cause significant social and environmental damage and argues that new accountability mechanisms are necessary to reduce or prevent such damage. Because such institutions operate on a global scale, only semi-judicial accounting mechanisms can provide the necessary accountability. It is time for the private financial sector to follow multilateral financial institutions in creating independent mechanisms, mediation procedures, and access to decision makers for people harmed or potentially harmed by projects financed by their institutions.

Policing the Banks is a passionate plea for global accountability for all powerful financial players - including the transnational private banks that are now entering the scramble for profits from development projects in the third world.

The World Resources Institute and Center for International Environmental Law will host a launch for Policing the Banks on Monday, December 15, 2008, 3:30 – 5:00 pm, at the World Resources Institute, 10 G Street NE, Suite 800, Washington, DC.

Maartje Van Putten was a member of the European Parliament (1989-99) and the World Bank Inspection Panel (1999-2004), and is currently a part of the Independent Review Mechanism of the African Development Bank.

Policing the Banks
Accountability Mechanisms for the Financial Sector
By Maartje Van Putten

International studies, economics

$34.95 CDN / USD paper
978-0-7735-3402-5
6 x 9, 520 pages

www.mqup.ca

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McGill-Queen's University Press
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Border Crossings reviews Scissors, Paper, Stone by Martha Langford

  978-0-7735-3211-3  May 2007

 Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art  by Martha Langford

reviewed in Border Crossings by Susan Close 

Even before the cover is lifted, the dust jacket of Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, suggests that the contents are likely to be challenging and provocative.  How, one may ask of the title, can scissors, paper and stone, either independently or as in the well-known hand game, collectively, be related to expressions of memory in photographic art?