"We must think for ourselves about our relationship with the earth. We must not make an abandoned shopping cart of our home."
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Abandoned Shopping Carts:
Personal and Spiritual Responsibility by William Bezanson Trafford Publishing
book review by Omar Figueras
Interesting in its approach as it explores global themes with a local perspective, William Bezanson's Abandoned Shopping Carts: Personal and Spiritual Responsibility is a collection of essays reflecting on the throw-away aspect of today's world. Containing various pictures of all sorts of shopping carts, the book uses them as symbols of abandonment and relates them to the earth as it, too, is an abandoned carts of sorts. The author includes among these carts a picture of a discarded stove he termed "hyper-littering" because he found it in the middle of a parking lot.
There are two sections, "Interludes," that are experimental in construction and fresh alternatives to the didactic tone embodied throughout the remainder of the book. Set in the future, rather, suspended above the time-space continuum as we understand it, these two Interludes are dialogues between Zenoch, as optimist, and Netherfeld, a pragmatist. In this plane apart from our reality the two men discuss this very book and the good it provided the earth and society in general. Bordering on speculative self-congratulation, the wording of these two sections are the most exciting and fresh. Bezanson turns his examining eye on himself and becomes the subject.
Despite the author borrowed slogans and catch phrases from popular advertisements, film, and television, Bezanson does get his point across. He immediately homes in and establishes that personal and global responsibility is the key to a better world. Some points of departure for some of the essays are a bit esoteric, but the writing is strong, articulate, and convincing.