"Fascinating stuff, and Moran delivers it in a relaxed and often
hilarious style"
--
Daily Telegraph"I've just read Queuing for Beginners by Joe Moran, an affectionate tribute to British life that's very funny and bang up to date with chapters on email etiquette and the seven-minute lunch break. It made me want to take the author to the pub, where I'd ask him why we drink beer in pints."
--
Sam West, Independent"One of those rare books written with academic rigour which has
mass market appeal. As a snapshot of how life used to be and what it has
become this book can't be beaten."
--
Bookbag.co.uk'An original idea that's well-executed and of interest to anyone
who's enjoyed a fry-up, stood by a water-cooler and slept under a duvet. By
interrogating the history of everyday objects and routines, Moran reveals
the contingent, often extraordinary, nature of daily life in Britain, and
the material culture that dominates it in the early 21st century. I
thoroughly enjoyed it.'
--
Richard Weight'Here is a book for everyone...It is crammed with arresting facts
and insights. Joe Moran writes more elegantly than a social historian has
any right to...I kept wanting to read out bits of this book to my children.
Partly because it sets in context the activities that will take up most of
their life - and partly because it might teach them just how little that is
dismissed as "boring" truly deserves the description.'
--
Sunday Times, May 27, 2007'Perfect summer reading'
--
Sunday Express, June 24, 2007'wonderfully entertaining...every page pulses with humour,
ephemeral research and irresistible nuggets of useless information...His
book is your life, examined by a post-modern academic in fluent and breezy
style, social history at its most accessible.'
--
Daily Mail, June 1, 2007`A thoroughly novel and refreshing way of looking at our recent
history. This is "mundane" as a good thing. It is a daybreak to bedtime
story told further from "them", and nearer to "us". Almost every page has
its "yes!..I'd forgotten" moment. I loved his book enormously.' --
Andrew Marr`A wonderfully insightful probe into the habits and rituals that
have made up daily life in Britain since the Second World War. Almost
nothing escapes Joe Moran's penetrating gaze; an inspired anthropologist of
the ordinary, and often very funny, he turns his readers into informed
observers, and gives an enhanced understanding of what we do every day
without a second thought and why we do it. You'll never eat a slice of
toast, join a queue or send an e mail in the same way again.' --
Juliet Gardiner`Queuing for Beginners is a splendidly entertaining book. Joe
Moran take a simple but wonderfully imaginative idea, following an ordinary
working day from breakfast to bedtime, and uncovers the twentieth-century
history of the mundane rituals through which we structure our lives.
Nothing escapes his gaze, from cereal packets to chain pubs, and the result
is a deft, clever and endlessly fascinating example of social history at
its best.' --
Dominic Sandbrook