Amazon.com Review
On the face of it, the morning paper, a cup of coffee, and the mug into which it's poured are simple, expected pleasures--rarely given much thought unless they fail to appear. So it seemed to journalist Leah Hager Cohen, until one particularly focused moment in a Boston coffee shop when she found herself pondering how disconnected she was from the unseen elements that brought her Sunday morning ritual to life. That instant was the genesis of
Glass Paper Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things. In it, Hager Cohen traces the stories of the glass cup from which she's sipping, the paper upon which her news is printed, and the coffee beans that gave birth to her morning jolt. This leads to tales of source origins and legends. But she also pays homage to the people involved in turning raw materials into consumer goods: Ruth Lamp, who oversees the Anchor Hocking glass factory's Lancaster, Ohio, select and pack department; Brent Boyd, a fourth-generation Canadian logger; and Basilio Salinas, who tends coffee plants on a cooperative in Pluma Hidalgo, near Oaxaca, Mexico. Woven throughout this thoughtful meditation are the elements that make the market tick, politics, philosophy, and musings on the role advertising plays in removing us from the true qualities of the items that we employ in daily life.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In sparkling, nimble prose, Cohen (Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World) recreates the story behind the "object"-in this instance, glass, paper and beans, although the object could as well be a toothbrush or a nail-and people whose livelihoods depend on those objects, a history of how the objects came to exist as well as a social account of the laborers' relationship to them and the consumer's mostly unknowing relationship in the chain. She restores the singularity of the worker by presenting individuals: widowed, 59-year-old Ruth Lamp, a night supervisor at the Anchor Hocking glass factory in Lancaster, Ohio; 32-year-old woods worker Brent Boyd, whose $600,000 harvester is a great curiosity in the lumber community of New Brunswick, Canada, where he, his wife and their two-year-old daughter live; and 26-year-old Basilio Salinas, who owns his own parcela of coffee field in a cooperative in Mexico, where he lives with his wife and three children. Cohen's acumen in focusing on these specific people makes her journey and ours particularly pleasurable; she signals connections among commodities and geography and time, supply and demand, raw materials and market forces. Drinking coffee in her local coffee shop while reading the Boston Globe had set Cohen to ruminating about the links between her, her coffee glass, the coffee and the newsprint of her paper. In tracing each material to its source, she delves into history (we learn that toilet paper existed in ninth-century China), politics and mercantilism (she brings in Marx and Thoreau here), and she and we discern that there is an essence in objects. And this difficult, enormously satisfying book reminds us also that the monetary system created our commodity world, fetishizing consumerism, which strips objects of their identities.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
