A Poison Like No Other, Matt Simon
A Poison Like No Other, Matt Simon
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

A Poison Like No Other
How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies

Author: Matt Simon

Narrator: Adam Verner

Unabridged: 6 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/27/2022


Synopsis

It's in our food, our clothes, and our homes. It's microplastic and it's everywhere—including our own bodies. Scientists are just beginning to discover how these tiny particles threaten health, but the studies are alarming.

In A Poison Like No Other, Matt Simon reveals a whole new dimension to the plastic crisis. Dealing with discarded plastic is bad enough, but when it starts to break down, the real trouble begins. The very thing that makes plastic so useful and ubiquitous—its toughness—means it never really goes away. It just gets smaller and smaller: eventually small enough to enter your lungs or be absorbed by crops or penetrate a fish's muscle tissue before it becomes dinner.

Unlike other pollutants, microplastics represent a cocktail of toxicity: plastics contain at least 10,000 different chemicals. Those chemicals are linked to diseases from diabetes to hormone disruption to cancers.

A Poison Like No Other is the first book to fully explore this public health threat. As Simon learns from these researchers, there is no easy fix. But we will never curb our plastic addiction until we begin to recognize the invisible particles all around us.

About Matt Simon

Matt Simon is a science journalist at Wired magazine, where he covers the environment, biology, and robotics. He's the author of Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World-and Ourselves and The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar: Evolution's Most Unbelievable Solutions to Life's Biggest Problems. He enjoys long walks on the beach and trying not to think about all the microplastics there.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Aaron

Before opening the book, I thought, "Just what I need: more nightmare fodder." This is a quick, fascinating, and depressing read about the prevalence of microplastics everywhere on the planet, from mountain peaks to ocean depths to the air in our lungs and the blood in our veins. With some horror on......more

At lot of doom and gloom that I skipped over in the first four chapters (I believe it all, it's just depressing to read). I got to the fifth chapter and it didn't have as much clear cut of a solution as I hoped, and it had few things I could do as a consumer.......more

Goodreads review by Liz

This book had a lot of really useful information, and I learned a lot while reading it, but I didn’t find it to be engaging. It’s a lot of data and after awhile that loses its punch. It took me an abnormally long time to finish this one because I zoned out a lot and honestly kind of dreaded having t......more