Unraveled
The Life and Death of a Garment
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Narrated by:
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Maxine Bedat
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By:
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Maxine Bedat
About this listen
Longlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
A groundbreaking chronicle of the birth - and death - of a pair of jeans, that exposes the fractures in our global supply chains, and our relationships to each other, ourselves, and the planet
Take a look at your favorite pair of jeans. Maybe you bought them on Amazon or the Gap; maybe the tag says "Made in Bangladesh" or "Made in Sri Lanka". But do you know where they really came from, how many thousands of miles they crossed, or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped, and sold them to get to you? The fashion industry operates with radical opacity, and it's only getting worse to disguise countless environmental and labor abuses. It epitomizes the ravages inherent in the global economy, and all in the name of ensuring that we keep buying more while thinking less about its real cost.
In Unraveled, entrepreneur, researcher, and advocate Maxine Bédat follows the life of an American icon - a pair of jeans - to reveal what really happens to give us our clothes. We visit a Texas cotton farm figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms. Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines. Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked, and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them. Finally, those jeans we had to have get sent to landfills--or, if they've been "donated," shipped back around the world to Africa, where they're sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and burned in mountains of garbage.
A sprawling, deeply researched, and provocative tour-de-force, Unraveled is not just the story of a pair of pants, but also the story of our global economy and our role in it. Told with piercing insight and unprecedented reporting, Unraveled challenges us to use our relationship with our jeans - and all that we wear - to reclaim our central role as citizens to refashion a society in which all people can thrive and preserve the planet for generations to come.
©2021 Maxine Bedat (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"A sharp angle on the hot topics of globalisation and sustainability, seen through the 'biography' of a pair of jeans. Bédat illustrates the environmental, economic and social pressures building up in the global fashion and garment industry and uncovers the unseen consequences of our thoughtless shopping choices." (Financial Times, Best Books of 2021, Business)
"Required reading for the conscientious." (Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and New Yorker writer)
“Unraveled is at once fascinating and disturbing. Read it before you buy a new pair of jeans, or anything else, for that matter. It will forever change the way you look at fashion." (Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction and New Yorker writer)
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An Important Topic
- By Roy on 11-06-10
By: Roo Rogers, and others
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Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy
- By: Tim Harford
- Narrated by: Roger Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy paints an epic picture of change in an intimate way by telling the stories of the tools, people, and ideas that had far-reaching consequences for all of us. From the plough to artificial intelligence, from Gillette's disposable razor to IKEA's Billy bookcase, best-selling author and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford recounts each invention's own curious, surprising, and memorable story.
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Thought provoking
- By Paul Norris on 09-10-17
By: Tim Harford
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Boom, Bust, Exodus
- The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities
- By: Chad Broughton
- Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.
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A Story I thought I Knew
- By Meek84 on 07-08-18
By: Chad Broughton
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The Great Reset
- How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity
- By: Richard Florida
- Narrated by: Eric Conger
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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We tend to view prolonged economic downturns, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Long Depression of the late 19th century, in terms of the crisis and pain they cause. But history teaches us that these great crises also represent opportunities to remake our economy and society and to generate whole new eras of economic growth and prosperity.
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glorification of City Life
- By Ryan Riggs on 11-25-20
By: Richard Florida
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Garbology
- Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
- By: Edward Humes
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The average American produces 102 tons of garbage across a lifetime, and $50 billion in squandered riches are rolled to the curb each year. But our bins are just the starting point for a strange, impressive, mysterious, and costly journey that may also represent the greatest untapped opportunity of the century. In Garbology, Edward Humes investigates trash - what's in it; how much we pay for it; how we manage to create so much of it; and how some families, communities, and even nations are finding a way back from waste to discover a new kind of prosperity.
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A phenomenal read & serious eye-opener
- By Andy Feicht on 10-07-18
By: Edward Humes
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The Prosperity Paradox
- How Innovation Can Lift Nations out of Poverty
- By: Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo, Karen Dillon
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Clayton M. Christensen, the author of such business classics as The Innovator’s Dilemma and the New York Times best-seller How Will You Measure Your Life, and coauthors Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon reveal why so many investments in economic development fail to generate sustainable prosperity and offers a groundbreaking solution for true and lasting change.
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Simplistic, lack of insights
- By D. Cameron on 05-24-21
By: Clayton M. Christensen, and others
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Getting Green Done
- Hard Truths From the Frontlines of Sustainability Revolution
- By: Auden Schendler
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Soccer moms drive Priuses. Sport utility vehicles are going hybrid. Families are using hemp shopping bags. More and more companies are developing "green" buildings. What's more, the business consultants say going green is easy and profitable. In reality, though, many green-leaning businesses, families, and governments are still fiddling with the small stuff while the planet burns. Why?
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Green's Dirty Little Secrets
- By Martin on 07-10-09
By: Auden Schendler
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The Undercover Economist
- By: Tim Harford
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Author of the extremely popular "Dear Economist" column in Financial Times, Tim Harford reveals the economics behind everyday phenomena in this highly entertaining and informative book. Can a book about economics be fun to read? It can when Harford takes the reins, using his trademark wit to explain why it costs an arm and a leg to buy a cappuccino and why it's nearly impossible to purchase a decent used car.
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Everyone needs to know this.
- By Paul Norwood on 04-24-06
By: Tim Harford
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Fulfillment
- Winning and Losing in One-Click America
- By: Alec MacGillis
- Narrated by: Danny Gavigan
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.
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Missing some important angles
- By D. Zimmerle on 08-19-21
By: Alec MacGillis
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Abundance
- The Future Is Better Than You Think
- By: Steven Kotler, Peter H. Diamandis
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing synthetic biology, and other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years.
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Perhaps multiply his time estimates by 10
- By Rick on 11-06-21
By: Steven Kotler, and others
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Triumph of the City
- How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
- By: Edward Glaeser
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the three percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly. Or are they? As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in cultural and economic terms) places to live.
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Urbanophile Brain Candy
- By Clay Downing on 12-18-15
By: Edward Glaeser
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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Upside
- Profiting from the Profound Demographic Shifts Ahead
- By: Kenneth W. Gronbach, M.J. Moye, John Zogby - foreword
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Demographics not only define who we are, where we live, and how our numbers change. For those who can read beyond the raw figures, they open up hidden business opportunities that lie ahead. What will happen when retiring Boomers free up jobs? How will Generation Y alter supermarkets? Which states will have the most dynamic workforces? Will American manufacturing rebound as Asia's population declines? Upside puts this powerful yet little-understood science to work finding answers.
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Needs rework to become an audio-book
- By Kristofer Jarl on 11-18-20
By: Kenneth W. Gronbach, and others
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The End of the Suburbs
- Where the American Dream is Moving
- By: Leigh Gallagher
- Narrated by: Jessica Geffen
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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For nearly 70 years, the suburbs were as American as apple pie. But in recent years things have started to change. An epic housing crisis revealed existing problems with this unique pattern of development, while the steady pull of long-simmering economic, societal and demographic forces has culminated in a Perfect Storm that has led to a profound shift in the way we desire to live. In The End of the Suburbs journalist Leigh Gallagher traces the rise and fall of American suburbia from the stately railroad suburbs that sprung up outside American cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries to current-day sprawling exurbs.
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Informative, but the title is a lie
- By Marie on 08-27-13
By: Leigh Gallagher
What listeners say about Unraveled
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- DK
- 11-16-21
Eye-opening and thorough
Really opened my eyes to the fashion industry and the people, businesses, and policies that drive it. Well-organized and at times absorbing, with lively narration. Highly recommend for anyone who wants an understanding of how the fashion industry operates today.
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- Candice
- 06-09-21
A fascinating look at the modern textile industry
As an amateur social historian, I'm deeply interested in the history of textiles and their production more than any other thing, and I thought that this book might be an interesting read on modern textile production. In that way, Ms. Bedat didn't disappoint. Unraveled is a well thought out, well written look at the life cycle of a pair of jeans. Ms. Bedat writes in an accessible, friendly way. She also has a wonderful voice for reading, and her flow and cadence made the audiobook a mostly easy listen.
One of the things I really liked was the way the book was set up, logically, to follow the cotton to the washers, to the spinners, to the weavers, etc. I make my own cloth, occasionally, and she didn't miss a step. She even pronounced "sliver" (Sly-ver) right, which isn't even common in those of us who know how to spin yarn by hand. Ms. Bedat was able to look at political and social issues that affect the industry without getting wallowed down in politics, or making those issues louder than the rest of the story.
There were only two things that bothered me. One was maybe me geeking out, but there were some inaccuracies in her presentation of history and textiles. I won't get deeply into it here, but the Cherokee were not primarily removed to provide arable land for cotton growing (they were mountain dwellers and gold was discovered shortly before the passing of the Indian Removal Act, but it's much more complicated than that.) Also, wool and linen garments worn by Northern Europeans were not itchy and uncomfortable, and continued to be used as the most common fabric even after the introduction of cotton, which was a luxury fabric for a long time. Finally, yes, organic fabrics may have chemicals used on them to process them, but Ms. Bedat leaves out the fact there are several certifying bodies - Oexo-Tex and GOTS are two - that certify that either the fabric was processed without chemicals or that there are no residual chemicals on the fabric at the time of wholesale.
The other thing was mispronunciations. A producer should have caught these and corrected them. The worst one, especially for a book about textile production, was "Man - ah - facturing." It would have been simple for the audio producer to correct Ms. Bedat's pronunciation and have her try again, rather than leaving it to become distracting and a bit infuriating as a very common word in the book (yes, I do realize that's a little petty!)
Would I recommend the book? Yes! Would I read it again? Yes, I probably will read it again. The breadth of the topic and the amount of information Ms. Bedat was able to compile about an industry with very little formal oversight was amazing.
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- Jennifer
- 01-29-23
I will never shop the same again
I learned so much listening to this. Hopefully others will listen, and some changes will be made.
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- M. D.
- 05-06-22
an eye opener
this book made a very coherent connection between economics, fashion industry, the environment, climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion. I will never be able to look at shopping again, and I'm done with "retail therapy".
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- thatsamiam
- 03-08-22
Interesting. learned a lot.
The writing style is a bit casual for my me...but it is not too bad. At the end there is a bit of hand waving about solving the issues. For example, using solar power. if business could... they would. But we literally don't have the technology yet. Can't just handwave the laws of physics. Business would love to use free power after paying up front cost. Simply can't generate enough power at this time using solar.
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- JCruz
- 02-29-24
Important Book, Whether or Not You’re Interested in Fashion
Accessible, engaging, thorough, thoughtful. This book is all of these and more as it takes the listener through the dispiriting truth of the global clothing industry. It’s essential to think about these topics and I can’t imagine reaching the end of this work without feeling that our habits must change. Bedat gives us some very useful perspective on how to do so.
Hearing this read by the author is excellent.
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- Goffy
- 02-16-24
Brings it together
Great storytelling to bring to light a number of key themes in the apparel industry. The chain is complex and long, this book does a good job of capturing the challenges, paradoxes and solutions.
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