Fascinating, thought-provoking, and necessary, Brian Thill's Waste is about not just our present but our future. You can't read it and come out of the experience unchanged. –Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Southern Reach trilogy
If 'waste, ' as Brian Thill points out, is any object plus time, then
Waste is waste plus spirited curiosity and tremendous intelligence. With a gaze full of vigor and heart, Thill looks at the fate of what we discard-from space junk to horse corpses to bird bellies split open from plastic-and illuminates invisible margins we'd often rather forget. I read the whole book in one sitting, spellbound. –
Leslie Jamison, New York Times-Bestselling Author of The Empathy Exams Waste is the finest filth around-or really the finest mediation of it I can think of: Thill looks deeply into how what we waste controls us at the level of the personal and the public-our discards become our fate and home both-and finds treasure. –
Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary–even banal–objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you've read a few of these, you'll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: 'I wonder what the story is behind this thing?'–
Steven Johnson, best-selling author of How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World The Object Lessons project, edited by game theory legend Ian Bogost and cultural studies academic Christopher Schaberg, commissions short essays and small, beautiful books about everyday objects from shipping containers to toast.
The Atlantic hosts a collection of mini object-lessons, brief essays that take a deeper look at things we generally only glance upon ('Is bread toast only insofar as a human toaster perceives it to be done? Is bread toast when it reaches some specific level of nonenzymatic browning?'). More substantive is Bloomsbury's collection of small, gorgeously designed books that delve into their subjects in much more depth.
–Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
