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‘A really important book’ RAYNOR WINN
From relics of Georgian empire-building and slave-trading, through Victorian London’s barged-out refuse to 1980s fly-tipping and the pervasiveness of present-day plastics, Rag and Bone traces the story of our rubbish, and, through it, our history of consumption.
In a series of beachcombing and mudlarking walks – beginning in the Thames in central London, then out to the Kentish estuary and eventually the sea around Cornwall – Lisa Woollett also tells the story of her family, a number of whom made their living from London’s waste, and who made a similar journey downriver from the centre of the city to the sea.
A beautifully written but urgent mixture of social history, family memoir and nature writing, Rag and Bone is a book about what we can learn from what we’ve thrown away – and a call to think more about what we leave behind.
From relics of Georgian empire-building and slave-trading, through Victorian London’s barged-out refuse to 1980s fly-tipping and the pervasiveness of present-day plastics, Rag and Bone traces the story of our rubbish, and, through it, our history of consumption.
In a series of beachcombing and mudlarking walks – beginning in the Thames in central London, then out to the Kentish estuary and eventually the sea around Cornwall – Lisa Woollett also tells the story of her family, a number of whom made their living from London’s waste, and who made a similar journey downriver from the centre of the city to the sea.
A beautifully written but urgent mixture of social history, family memoir and nature writing, Rag and Bone is a book about what we can learn from what we’ve thrown away – and a call to think more about what we leave behind.
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Reviews
Rag and Bone digs deep into the mud of the Thames estuary, and comes up with something compelling and urgent - history told through rubbish. Lisa Woollett is a genuine mudlark, alert and closely attuned to the ways of the intertidal zone. A fascinating book
Mudlark and beachcomber Lisa Woollett journeys into her family's past, our collective history and our possible futures. Subtle, dark and funny, with flashes of beauty and wonder, Rag and Bone is a compelling meditation on the consumer culture and its consequences
A delicious confection of a book, blending history and memoir with thoughts and close observation. I so enjoyed watching shadows of the past flit across Lisa Woollett's watery pages. It is a timely book, too, when, as Woollett writes, "our waste threatens to overwhelm us"
Tracing the remote and recent past - her own, and ours - through watery debris, Lisa Woollett conjures up, in poetic prose and brilliant stories, the spin cycle of history. In Rag and Bone, she elegantly picks her way through the trash, to reveal something gloriously and richly strange: a portrait of what we were and what we might become
Lisa Woollett's beautifully descriptive language intertwines the stories of the river's history with that of her family, like a muddy journey through time. But it's so much more than that - in recording the waste and the lives we've left behind she's given us a chance to change our ways and possibly head towards a cleaner future
[A] beguiling blend of memoir, nature writing and social history
More than personal memoir, this is a powerful book that has much to say about the present and future state of our world
A constant delight . . . highly recommended
Lisa Woollett spins narrative gold out of literal dross in this gorgeous story of our waterways that lulls you like a punt on the Cam before making you seasick at the damage we've wrought on the oceans
Absorbing . . . Woollett has a gift for bringing to life the strange borderlands of the foreshore
Accompanied by the fantastically beautiful photographs of her finds, Woollett . . . traces her own family history in poetic prose
Woollett weaves the story of her own London family within the wider social history of recycling . . . the book is illustrated with photographs of her finds arranged in ways that often say as much as the words do about the subject matter
Wonderful . . . If you loved The Salt Path, you'll love this book. A glorious celebration of where the natural world meets the human (and the messes we make)
[Woollett's] mudlarking (preferred tool: a butter knife) reveals no end of social history washed up on the shore and awaiting interpretation
Entrancing
Subtle, lyrical and funny
Discursive, lyrical and intriguing . . . Woollett writes beautifully
Rag and Bone is more than a history in a hundred objects: it is a meditation on our relationship with objects themselves