Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. By Susan Freinkel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 324 pp.)

Abstract

Everyday histories bear the stamp of the schools of history from which they originate. They can span a whole horizon reaching from material to social history to culture histories with their construction of the popular mind. Material histories must introduce the tools, goods, clothing, and dwellings of a people, they must place things in the context of values, customs, fashions, and sensibilities which determine their use and value. Likewise, material histories must describe the makers of goods but also identify the localities, regions, and commerce that exchanged them. Essential to everyday history is a literal description of the materials from which things were made and by which they were assessed in value. We need, for instance, to acknowledge in antiquity the role of bronze, which outfitted Goliath in his meeting with David and equipped Homer's heroic Achaeans before the walls of Troy in the eleventh century B. C. The source and the prestige of material is crucial for sorting out who is who, what is associated with what, and how places are tied together. This is all well done in a 2011 work, Robert Finlay's The Pilgrim Art, on cultures of porcelain in world history and the prestige Chinese ceramics, which lit the royal hearts and kilns of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. If we are to touch, feel, and see everyday life, say in a nineteenth-century city, we must recognize the growing role of iron and steel, glass, cement and rubber.