Rag and Bone, Lisa Woollett
Rag and Bone, Lisa Woollett
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Rag and Bone
A Family History of What We've Thrown Away

Author: Lisa Woollett

Narrator: Karen Cass

Unabridged: 6 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: John Murray

Published: 06/11/2020

Synopsis

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.

(p) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

About Lisa Woollett

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

Goodreads review by Pam on January 09, 2024

I found myself engrossed with this book and its subjects. Woollett manages to weave history, family history, and ecology into a very readable book. In addition to her writing, she takes interesting photographs of her collections. The book journeys from old treasures to plastic junk. Woollett has a l......more

Goodreads review by Claire on August 18, 2020

I really enjoyed this non-fiction book about the things human beings have thrown away over the centuries, mixed in with a little history about Woollett's family many of whom were dustmen. Woollett takes us to various sites on the Thames foreshore in London where she finds clay pipes and buttons and......more

Goodreads review by Vanessa on August 01, 2020

I picked this book up as a fellow beachcomber. I love beachcombing in Northern California & it was fun to compare similarities in our treasure finds. I’m not big on historical reads but nonetheless I learned quite a few interesting facts about London, old trades, geography & the startling lives of t......more

Goodreads review by Martin on December 19, 2020

There’s a really strong idea behind this book. Lisa Woollett is a lifelong beachcomber and mudlark, and one line of her ancestors were trash collectors in Victorian and Edwardian London. She interweaves her own impressions of collecting for fun along seashore and riverbank with historical looks at h......more

Goodreads review by Clare on August 25, 2022

In a series of walks from the Thames, out to the Kentish estuary and eventually to Cornwall the author traces the history of our rubbish and, through it, reveals the surprising story of our changing consumer culture. This is an important read which shows what we can learn from what we have thrown awa......more

Quotes

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

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)

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

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

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

Entrancing

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 Evening Standard, Books to Read This Summer

Absorbing . . . Woollett has a gift for bringing to life the strange borderlands of the foreshore Observer

Discursive, lyrical and intriguing . . . Woollett writes beautifully Literary Review

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