loppear reviewed Secondhand by Adam Minter
Review of 'Secondhand' on Goodreads
4 stars
Traveling journalist spends time with our stuff, our sense that our used things ought to have value, and the surprising value that the world finds in what we discard as broken waste. A good global perspective with intersecting stops in Minnesota, Arizona, Japan, Malaysia, Ottawa, India, Ghana, and Nigeria; to storage units and Goodwills and used bookstores and electronics repair and washing machine factories. The messages that emerge are a) the trend is towards far too much stuff in middle class places everywhere b) more and more stuff is uselessly short-lived, fad, and designed not to be reusable (good notes on Right to Repair, declining quality, and the materials involved) and c) secondhand things, even broken things that are willingly repaired, are sought after in developing markets to their benefit, but our personal, manufacturer, and legal attitudes about it hamper and discard much of the value along the way.
