Annie Leonard, "The Story of Stuff"

If you watched the free 20 minute online "Story of Stuff" documentary and thought "That's great, but I wish it was drier, and more packed with an overwhelming volume of information," then this book is for you!  I hate to sound catty, but it's true.   Sadly, this book takes everything that made the documentary great, and does the exact opposite.

Charitably, The Story of Stuff (the book) could be said to be a companion piece to the documentary.  A tome for those who watched the movie and wanted to dispute the facts.  A dense brick of text, thick with footnotes, heavy on policy wonkery and clunky writing.

The genius of the "Story of Stuff" documentary is that it was told in plain English, without a lot of judgment - just the facts.  It was illustrated with an animated style of ink brush figures that are both charming and clean, giving a lot of white space to the screen, which lets you focus on what's being said.  

Here the formula is reversed - the little animated characters are scattered occasionally throughout the text, serving as random bullet points.  They do nothing to break up the text which marches on, paragraph after paragraph, weighing the reader down with one long boring diatribe about how we're ruining the planet.

Leonard's writing style is distinctly a product of her background with NGOs and policymaking organizations.  Here's a sentence I chose by stabbing my finger at random into the book:  

"One of my colleagues there, Rob Weissman, a Harvard-trained lawyer and leading critic of the WTO, used to chide me for my obsession with factories and dumps, urging me to join those fighting the WTO instead of, or more accurately in addition to, working on garbage."

This is postdoc-level writing, and there's nothing wrong with that.  It just came as a surprise after the documentary's plain-spoken, transparent language.  If the documentary is Hemingway, the book is a Congressional memo.

The great thing about the documentary was how simple it made everything.  These are complicated issues, and the real value is in boiling them down to the simplest elements.  We don't need anyone to make them more complicated.  

I found myself wondering what the point of the book was in the first place.  It fails as a companion piece to the documentary, because it's harder to follow, less engaging, and roughly 200% more depressing.  It doesn't offer anything that you can't find in the documentary except three metric tons of facts.  

If it's meant to reach people that the documentary couldn't, it's going to fail at that, too, because people hate to read.  (They especially hate to read big boring sad things.)  A graphic novel would have worked well; this book will not.

I wasn't sure what to expect from a book called The Story of Stuff and frankly, I'm still not.  If you're trying to decide between reading the book or watching the documentary, you should definitely watch the documentary.  It's fantastic, and effective, and can literally change your life.