Plastic: An Autobiography

WINNER of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction!

WINNER of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction!

“Plastic is powerful and moving, a deep, personal exploration of the modern world.”—Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize recipient for The Making of the Atomic Bomb

In Plastic: An Autobiography, Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives―from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama―the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.