Garbage Land

The juiciest parts of any pop-science book are its digressions. A good story will always engage, but when an author can't help but get into the minutiae, that's usually where the hidden gems lie.

Take Garbage Land, science writer Royte's engrossing gross-out of a book about the path trash takes once it leaves your home. After running through all the questions she could possibly have about a dump—and Royte's strength as a writer is that she can conjure up a lot of questions about a dump—she decides to start composting. Faced with a bin full of meat, egg shells, lawn clippings and the like, Royte wonders, "Why does this stuff stink so bad?"

She calls an experimental psychologist who built a machine to measure the rankness of various compounds. Deep in the discussion is a mention of the psychologist's work building a nonlethal "odor bomb" for the Department of Defense. The winning bomb, which could be used for crowd control, smelled like human waste, burning hair and rotting garbage.

Those kinds of asides make or break a book like Garbage Land, and Royte is careful never to drift too far off-topic. An ancillary joy to her writing is watching Royte become alternately repulsed and fascinated by what she discovers: During a tour of a sewage plant, for instance, she has to be told a bit of effluent clinging to a screen is not a kalamata olive. She also proves quite resourceful, from shaking some fertilizer into her hand to "see what holding someone else's highly processed feces felt like," to tracking down a guy in Maine who drives an SUV powered by the grease from local restaurants.

Garbage Land clearly follows the trend of nonfiction books that explore small, discarded sections of life, like Stiff or Rats. That's hardly a complaint. It's difficult to find fault in an enterprising writer with a rich sense of humor who dives in and gets her hands dirty.—Jonathan Messinger