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Zusatztext A New York Times Notable Book of the Year One of the Toronto Globe and Mail 's Ten Best Books of the Year "A minor miracle...After you read it! nothing-not even a sheet of newsprint-will seem ordinary again." -New York Times Book Review "Cohen's tracing of the three objects is fascinating! but what really sets it apart is the poetic beauty of the prose." --Philadelphia Inquirer "The book itself seems to vibrate in your hands as you discover an odd mysticism rooted in the most ordinary and most obvious." --Thomas Moore! author of Care of the Soul "These are not merely stories about production and commerce! but richly hued! intimate portraits of people whose work and lives are seamlessly integrated...Something to be savored." --Toronto Globe and Mail "At the deepest level! this is a book about storytelling as a mission of discovery and transcendence." --New York Newsday Informationen zum Autor Leah Hager Cohen Klappentext Once upon a time we knew the origins of things: what piece of earth the potato on our dinner plate came from, which well our water was dipped from, who cobbled our shoes, and whose cow provided the leather. In many parts of the world, that information is still readily available. But in our society, even as technology makes certain kinds of information more accessible than ever, other connections are irrevocably lost. In Glass, Paper, Beans, Leah Cohen traces three simple commodities on their geographic and semantic journey from her rickety table at the Someday Café to their various points of origin. As Cohen draws the reader Oz-like across time and continents, she brings to life three unforgettable characters whose labor provides the glass for her mug, the pulp for her newspaper and the beans for her cup of coffee. In prose as sophisticated as it is simple, she braids the myths, lore, and history of these three simple staples and conjures an unseen world where economics, fetishization, and manufacture meet. An elegant and inspired inquiry into the true nature of things, Glass, Paper, Beans is a classic work on the economy of everyday life. Morning Every day this happens: We rotate into light. Light meets a band of Earth, drapes itself simultaneously across grass and waves and trash cans, awnings and snow and mango trees, gas pumps and basketball courts and steeples and iguanas, gravestones, and quarries and billboards and skin. We say of this, "The sun has risen." Every day this happens, all over the world, for all of our lives. The earth pivots round on its axis, and every moment, from north to south, a great strip of us who have never met, and will never meet, enter the day together. The zones defined by these slices of dawn, these longitudinal coincidences, mean little or nothing to us. As boundaries, as articulations of territory, these strips of light are at least as delineated as any political border, but the communities formed by them are nonexistent. Most maps don't even bother printing such lines; those that do render them minutely: in gossamer lengths of ink, infinitesimal jottings of number and degree. If we note them at all, rarely is it in relation to ourselves, to our own imaginable lives. How many of us could report the number of degrees and minutes east or west of the prime meridian we live? Of those, how many would identify as members of a community of people who reside along that north-south strip? It is preposterous. We have not been taught to see that way. Instead we have nations. We have provinces, states, districts, regions. Some of their borders coincide with natural features of the earth's surface; others flout them. A few borders are made manifest in barbed wire, signposts, tollbooths, gateways; many more are manifest only on paper, in the forms of maps and charters, treaties and accords, pa...
