Letter to the Editor

This is the e-mail I posted to Ebury Publishing and their response:

I am currently reading The Year of Eating Dangerously by Tom Parker Bowles and have become very concerned about your editing staff. Small errors keep cropping up and I am only on page 120. Mr Parker Bowles writes "a once-secret city and birthplace of the atom bomb that destroyed Osaka." My initial reaction was to check to make sure that my American history lessons were not entirely revisionist and that Osaka was not also bombed along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then later determined, perhaps this was a simple editing mistake. Later Mr. Parker Bowels does credit Hiroshima and Nagasaki to have being bombed--atomically with no mention of Osaka. The following chapter I encounter Mr. Bowles in China calling himself a gai-jin on page 87. Why would Mr. Parker Bowles refer to himself in China with the Japanese word for foreigner rather than the Cantonese word (since he is in Hong Kong) gweilo or the Mandarin laowai? Then soon following this blunder, on page 120 Mr. Bowles talks about the National People's Congress where "Bush senior puked into an astonished President's lap." Mr. Bush senior found himself ill in Tokyo and disgraced himself with the Japanese Prime Minister. Are you sure that Mr. Parker Bowles was ever actually in China. Or is Mr. Parker Bowles and your editorial staff of the opinion that one yellow country is just the same as another? I am quickly losing faith in Mr. Parker Bowles' book and in your publishing company. I understand how difficult it is to edit and I know that this is not intended to be high journalism. But at the same time, I do expect, non-fiction books that I read to be mostly parsed of blatant non-factualisms such as the ones I have come across.
I am perplexed and disturbed by this book--so much so, this is the first time I have ever felt compelled to write a publisher. I can understand taking liberties and stringing a bit of a tall-tale in travel writing. Paul Theroux is quite an artist at it, but these errors ring of something else entirely.

Regards

Their response was:

Thank you for taking the time to write with regard to The Year of Eating Dangerously. I am Tom’s editor and am grateful to you for alerting me to these mistakes and the possibility of others. (If I had not been on maternity leave at the time it went to press I would have known about them long ago.)

Tom’s travels and the resulting book are infused with fervor and excitement, but as his editorial team it was our responsibility to ensure that enthusiasm was always backed up with accuracy, so that the understandable muddles of a traveler’s notes don’t make it into the printed word.

And clearly that didn’t happen here. The copyediting process went very badly wrong – the team were already aware of this – but clearly not enough was done to ensure linguistic and historical accuracy even after we knew it had gone wrong.

After your email we will be reediting the paperback before any reprint goes to press.

If there are any other questions I can answer pls don’t hesitate to get in touch. Or indeed if there are any other Ebury press titles I can introduce you too please let me know.

Best wishes

Hannah MacDonald

My Comments:

If you caught the name Parker Bowles than Yes, it is The Parker Bowles of Charles and Camilla fame. His status makes me all the more disappointed in the errors. I was already getting tired of the book. Except for the first chapter which is based in the UK the two other that I have read--at a chile tasting in New Mexico and now the chapter on China, he seems to winge and prattling on about how much he misses safe food, McDonald's, and his comfy life in England.

China is truly a country with some of the most amazing food I have ever tried or seen--often mind bending. Fierce looking cats, mouths permanently pulled back baring their sharp teeth. Skinless, they hang from stalls almost as if warding off evil spirits. Other things in the markets that I couldn't even dare guess at but the guide book assured me that a variety of penises were among them.

A night festival along the Li River that offered tiny frogs skewed whole on bamboo sticks. So very cute, all lined up sitting one on top of the other. And a whole rabbit covered in some sort of pastry. I remember feeling that perhaps I had jumped down the rabbit hole of Wonderland. The haunting dreamlike images of that festival hang with me even today

The outdoor butcher stand at the village Saturday Market in Southern China where a scraggly dog would make brave forays to snatch tiny bits of left over meat off the table. The eel that jumped out of his bucket to dance on the restaurant dirt floor before being returned to the tank, thus ensuring that he had yet one more day to live. The street side vendor's soup pot with a chicken thigh & leg complete with the foot brazenly poking out. The pigs in bamboo pokes carried in a stacked pyramid of six on the back of motor bikes. The cold I had cured on the Trans Siberian by drinking powered snake's gall bladder. Sharp and strong but itseemed to have worked--or maybe that was just the vodka mixed with the Pear(?) Tang procured at the food commissary in Beijing.

No, all Mr. Parker Bowles really gets around to is complaining about stinky tofu in China. Yes, it smells--and perhaps he encountered much stronger varieties than I did. And, yes, even what I tried was far too sharp for McDonaldized tastebuds but it was by far the least of the things that I would remark on in the wonders of Chinese cuisine and of "the people that will eat anything with four legs except a table." It will be a challenge to finish the book. I will. But, I may have to vent several more times on it before it is done.