Vivian Zamel and Ruth Spack have collected papers spanning 19 years of discussion onteaching academic literacy, offering an illuminating journey through the issues. In a postmodernspirit, the editors emphasize the multiplicity of literacies and the value of students' ownways of knowing. The question arises, though, why this should be specifically taught by applyinga particular pedagogical model, because it appears to be a normal part of any intellectual processto fall back on previous knowledge and experience when faced with a new task. Indeed, weedingit out would seem a bigger problem, should anyone want to accomplish that. The recognition andappreciation of students' previous experiences and earlier knowledge is neverthelesswelcome, and there are a few well-chosen papers narrating personal experiences of strugglebetween different cultural identities and logics. Yet many of the papers in this volume,particularly in its first half, tacitly seem to assume that English is the language of the world andthat the North American context equals universal. Much of the discussion is dominated by acontroversy between discipline-specific (genre-based or disciplinary community-based) andexpressive writing, or, perhaps, rather a crusade against genre-based teaching, given thatproponents of this orientation have not been given voice. From a North European perspective,this bifurcation into two opposing camps seems hard to comprehend—many of us havehappily combined genre analysis, analysis of cultural differences in rhetoric, and criticaldiscourse analysis with a view of writing as process and discovery.