Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash - Hardcover

Royte, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316738263 ISBN 13: 9780316738262

Verlag: Little, Brown and Company, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

DESCRIPTION: Like the bestselling Fast Food Nation, GARBAGE LAND lifts the lid off a world we take for granted, revealing its complicated, surprising underbelly. In this highly unconventional travel book, Elizabeth Royte leads the reader on a cultural tour guided and informed by the things she throws away. Structured around four separate journeys--those of Royte s household trash, compostable matter, recyclables, and sewage--GARBAGE LAND is a literary investigation of the truly dirty side of consumption. Royte melds science, anthropology, and a strong dose of clear-headed analysis in her appraisal of America s relationship with its garbage, examining the uncomfortable subject of waste in much the same way Mary Roach s Stiff tackled corpses. By showing us what really happens to the things we ve "disposed of," Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact--and that, like it or not, the garbage we create will always be with us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

AUTHORBIO: Elizabeth Royte has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper s, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker. She was the recipient of an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship in 1999. She lives in Brooklyn.

Rezensionen

The v-p of a New York City waste transfer station recommends, "You want to solve the garbage problem? Stop eating. Stop living." Indeed, to ponder waste disposal is to confront the very limits of our society. Where does it all go? Most of us are content to shrug off the details—as long as it's out of sight (and smell). Not so journalist Royte, whose book in some ways (including its title) echoes Fast Food Nation. That McDonald's is more immediately engaging a subject doesn't make, say, the massive, defunct Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, N.Y., any less compelling. Royte nicely balances autobiographical elements (where does her Fig Newmans carton end up, anyway?), interviews and fieldwork with more technical research. Her method yields palpable benefits, not least a wealth of vivid refuse-related slang (maggots are known as disco rice). The details unavoidably venture into the nauseating on occasion, and some might find the chemistry of trichloroethane and other toxins a bit dull. As the NIMBY logic of waste disposal forces its practitioners into secrecy, Royte is obliged to engage in some entertainingly furtive skullduggery. All in all, this is a comprehensive, readable foray into a world we'd prefer not to heed—but should.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Royte, a science writer, has written a disturbing and enlightening book about the 2 percent of our total waste stream that American households generate. Despite Garbage Land’s almost inevitable environmentalist sympathies, Royte does not offer up easy answers; in fact, she leaves readers sensing the futility of their own small efforts to recycle and reduce waste. Although Royte considers herself to be "in the middle of the argument," her liberal perspective might grate some readers. Even though portions of the book are overly technical or obviously biased, Garbage Land transcends the usual environmental audience to interest any reader.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Royte is a journalist with a nose for the "sordid afterlife" of trash, thoroughly at home in the putrid world of "Coney Island whitefish" (used condoms); "disco rice" (maggots); and—the darling of American consumer culture and the nemesis of waste activists—"Satan's resin" (plastic). Her book takes the form of a quest for the surprising final resting places of her yogurt cups, beer bottles, personal computer, and organic-fig-cookie packaging, and leads to an impassioned attack on overconsumption in America. If Royte does not quite demonstrate the muckraking skills of an Eric Schlosser in "Fast Food Nation," she does expose the feculent underside of our appetite for things and challenges her readers to disprove the resigned assessment of a former New York sanitation commissioner: "In the end, the garbage will win."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

*Starred Review* A visit to the filthy Gowanus Canal near her Brooklyn home got Royte thinking about garbage. What exactly does her family throw out each day? Who carries it away, where is it taken, how is it processed? To find out, she catalogs her daily household garbage and tracks her trash to garbage transit stations, landfills, and recycling plants. Royte's nervy and unprecedented journey through the land of garbage is fascinating, appalling, and--thanks to her keen first-person journalism, commonsense skepticism, and amusing personal asides--downright entertaining. Some of her more troubling disclosures include the hazards of sewage sludge and "e-waste," that is, discarded computers, televisions, and cell phones. Smart and persistent, Royte annoys the heck out of closemouthed government officials and waste-management businesspeople and trespasses when denied access to key sites, enduring foul smells and bad vibes to glean the truth about how waste is handled, who profits from waste, what opportunities are wasted, and how waste can be reduced. What her staggering expose tells us is that as the quantity, variety, and toxicity of our garbage increases, we must, like nature, evolve ways to reclaim and reuse everything we make. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Little, Brown and Company
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0316738263
• ISBN 13: 9780316738262
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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