Customer Reviews

Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are

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This is an accessible but theoretically sophisticated study of American lawns, and the reasons why people who are anxious about the effects of lawn chemicals on themselves, their children and their pets (including a woman who put booties on her dog when its paws bled after it walked on a chemically-treated lawn, rather than stopping the chemical treatment!) continue to use lawn chemicals and obsess over having a monocultured turfgrass lawn. Robbins writes with a minimum of jargon and name-dropping -- any undergraduate could easily follow his arguments without much difficulty -- but also quietly engages with actor-network theory, Foucauldian and Gramscian notions of power, hegemony and subject formation, as well as putting ecology into political ecology. It's a book which could sit equally well on an undergraduate or graduate syllabus, which speaks both to its clarity and the sophistication of its analysis. Highly recommended.