thought I knew what I was signing up for when I opened Allison Cobb’s “Plastic: An Autobiography.” “Plastic” emblazoned on the front amid multicolored, sun-bleached plastic fragments accurately promised to reveal the cultural and scientific roots of plastic, and to raise my awareness about the nature of this modern scourge. But its biggest gift was one I did not realize I needed. After the first few pages, I flipped back to the cover to notice the teasing “autobiography” part of the title. Cobb tells stories of her own roots and evolution, blurring her past with the people and industries that brought us plastic, showing, not telling, with the deft use of vignettes and anecdotes. Her prose embodies the theme that plastic is within us and without us, inextricable from the modern body, soul and world. Not only do we each eat about a credit card’s worth of plastic each week, but you may have noticed that when we reach out to touch our world, we increasingly make contact with these synthetic polymers … like this keyboard at my fingertips.
Most books about environmental issues are cerebral and heavy, predictably bruising. The reader is tempted to compartmentalize, because it’s hard to integrate the bad news about our planet’s health and our part in it. But in addition to being a rigorous scientific thinker and intrepid investigator, Cobb is a poet. Lines from poetry—her own and others’—populate many pages, and her poetic sensibility provides a dreamy and illuminating structure to her ambitious endeavor. The result is almost a meditation, creating fertile ground for the reader to join her in making an intimate connection to plastics, and to process the implications of its prevalence for our own families and the world around us. To view the full article visit the Free Lance Star.