Rag and Bone

A Family History of What We've Thrown Away

Lisa Woollett

$39.99

Hardback

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English

John Murray
08 September 2020

Biography; British & Irish history; Pollution & threats to the environment; Family history, tracing ancestors

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.

By: Lisa Woollett
Imprint: John Murray
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 218mm, Width: 142mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 400g
ISBN: 9781473663961
ISBN 10: 1473663962
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 08 September 2020
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Lisa Woollett's family have found value in what is thrown away for generations - her great-grandfather was a scavenger and her grandfather was a dustman, while she herself has been a beachcomber all her life, and in recent years has taken photographs of her beach and river finds. She is the author of two award-winning photography books about the sea, and Rag and Bone won a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction. She has lived in Cornwall with her family since 2004, in a house shared with buckets and boxes of shore finds.

Reviews for Rag and Bone: A Family History of What We've Thrown Away

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 -- Caspar Henderson 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 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 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 -- Philip Marsden