Nation Guide: The Reaction

Published last month, The Nation Guide to the Nation is an essential lifestyle guide for millions of progressives nationwide. Identifying small businesses, lefty cultural institutions, activist organizations, and hip gathering places, the collection is a new source for finding art collectives, food co-ops, independent bookstores, reading clubs, camps for radical kids, slow food restaurants, eco-friendly products, political tourism or left-leaning cemeteries.

It's also your guide to the top protest songs, political films and left-wing murder mysteries of all-time, as Paper Cuts, the New York Times book blog, recently emphasized in a post on the book as well as a compendium of "an amazingly large, if informal, progressive infrastructure in place, locally and nationally," as Nation Guide author Richard Lingeman explained in a recent interview with the Progressive Book Club.

This is just one example of the almost universally positive reception the book has so far received. (For the rare less-than-positive [but still commercially useful] press, click here.)

The Feministing blog celebrates "a guide to sustainable living--with lots of info about how to eat and drink locally, support small business, stick it to the man--but also a quirky intellectual and historical tour de force."

BlogCritic's Barbara Barnett calls the book "an invaluable resource" for "people wanting to find their progressive political, spiritual and social homes."

The Pittsburgh City Paper lauded the book's "Pittsburgh shout-outs" to the city's venerable history including the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike; the Rachel Carson Homestead; and Maxo Vanko's mid-century protest murals in Millvale's St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church.

The Portland Phoenix says the book plays several useful roles -- "a liberal travel guide as well as textbook...honoring those who fought for or embodied liberal causes."

Creative Loafing gave the book reasonably high marks for its assessments of Georgia alternative cultural outposts.

Writing in Playback STL, the alt weekly in St. Louis, Sarah Boslaugh says that the Guide "is not just a lifeline for people who feel trapped in a cultural backwater; even residents of the hippest, most progressive census tract in the United States (whatever that might be) will enjoy browsing, and will probably find themselves learning a few things as well. It could also come in handy if you want to plan the perfect lefty road trip or if your job sends you to a conference in Baltimore or Atlanta or Lawrence, Kansas, and you want to find congenial bars and bookstores where you can hang out."

The Living Liberally network has also come put in support of the book and various chapters have been meeting and discussing the Guide coast to coast. On January 27th, the Salt Lake City LL chapter staged a large event on the book. Read Jeremiah Roth's report on the "fun exercise in discussing what we would choose as our favorite liberal things in town."

Check out LL's site for details on upcoming Nation Guide events on February 19th in Washington, DC and February 28th in Chicago, see the Nation Guide site for more info generally, and use the comments box below to let us know of any institutions we left out of the book.

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