Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Where Am I Wearing?

Despite the fact that it was only 250 pages of not particularly dense or wordy text, I found Where am I Wearing?, by Kelsey Timmerman, to be pretty slow going. It's a first-hand account of his travels around the world, trying to visit the factories that made the clothes he wears.

The opening chapters describing why he decided to write this book, and the brief mention of his trip to Honduras (where his t-shirt was made), and stuff about anti-Globalization people were all kind of boring. Once he got past that it started to pick up a bit. His trip to Bangladesh, where they made his boxers, was slightly more interesting. He learned a good bit about the country and its people, but the book was still failing to grip me at this point.

Once he came to Cambodia, where his jeans were made, it became more interesting. There was a lot more about him trying to connect to the workers who made his jeans. Yes, he spent some time with a Bangladeshi worker called Arifa, but he didn't seem to devote as much space trying to connect to her. He takes the Cambodians bowling and goes with them to visit their home village. He does something similar for the Chinese workers who made his flip flops. After that, he makes a brief stop at the American factory that made his favorite shorts 15 years ago.

It's mostly a good book, once it pick up about halfway through. Though I do find his harping on how much richer American are than the people who make their clothes to be annoying. Still, it is an interesting book.

2 comments:

Kelsey said...

Yoyogod, I wanted to thank you for your thoughtful review. Since you finished "Where am I Wearing?" have you started to pay attention to the tags on your clothes more? Just curious.

Thanks,

Kelsey

Unknown said...

No, I'm not really the sort of person to be paying attention to that sort of stuff. I just generally don't care enough about my clothes to wonder about where they were made.