Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are Book

Robbins once lived in a house in the suburbs that had a lawn, felt pressured to take care of it, ended up letting weeds ruin it, and felt guilty for years. Lawn People is an attempt to assuage his feelings of anxiety about that, and absolutely nothing more or less.
There were a few conclusions he wanted to reach: 1. that refusing to use herbicides was the morally correct position, 2. that he couldn't have saved his lawn without them, and 3. that the pressure he felt from his neighbours to take care of his lawn was real. Obviously 1 and 3 are true and 2 is false, but that's not the point'the point is to make himself feel better, and that requires pretending that all three are right, which he does. If that means repeatedly contradicting himself or flat-out quoting marketing copy from herbicide manufacturers as fact, he'll do that and not even think twice about it.
The result is a garbled mess of a booklet that incidentally serves as fodder for people who want to snort in derision at suburban lawn culture'a fine enough pursuit'but doesn't provide an honest examination of anything, except perhaps of what happens when academic hackery is wielded in the service of blinkered suburbanite neuroticism.

Fortunately, Robbins does provide a list of books on lawns that sound much more promising in his introduction'his ``sources'', presumably'and I'll give some of those a try instead.