Plastic: an Autobiography
The second printing of Plastic: An Autobiography is out, with a series of discussion questions for classrooms and bookclubs as well as a critical essay by Dr. Lynn Keller. Winner of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award and the 2022 Oregon Book Award with the following citation from author John Freeman: “Why have we created a culture of such wanton waste if we want to live on earth? In the long shelf of books interrogating our moment in the climate crisis, this memoir is a sharp, urgent breakthrough, a triumph of honesty.”
The book blends reportage, research and memoir. An abandoned plastic car part inspires a journey through the past and present to interrogate the role of plastic in our lives.
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"There is elegance and power in Cobb’s truly unique environmental memoir."—Starred Booklist
“An ardent message about environmental peril.”—Kirkus Reviews
PRAISE
“Plastic is powerful and moving, a deep, personal exploration of the modern world.”
Pulitzer Prize recipient for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Plastic: an Autobiography is a spinning gyre of history, biology, poetry, and chemistry, gathering centripetal force through attention to such particulars as a shard of plastic from WWII found lodged in the belly of an albatross sixty years later. This is a fierce and brilliant work that perhaps could only have been written by a poet who grew up in the shadow of Los Alamos, aware that the most destructive of human inventions can seem salvific until it is almost too late. Let this book be a call to awareness and action.
—Carolyn Forché
Author of What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
Allison Cobb's Plastic: an Autobiography is the story of all of our lives. Gripping, informative, and moving, the book is both convicted and convicting, revealing the dirty and the brilliant underpinnings of our modern world. Once I picked it up, I didn't want to put this book down. And when I finished reading, I knew much more about all the things I didn't know I needed to know.
Author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
About Allison
Allison Cobb (pronouns she/her) is the author of Plastic: an Autobiography (2021) from Nightboat Books. Her other books include After We All Died (Ahsahta Press); Born2 (Chax Press); and Green-Wood, originally published by Factory School with a new edition in 2018 from Nightboat Books.
Follow @AllisonKCobb on Instagram
