Reviews for Requiem for a Paper Bag: Celebrities and Civilians Tell Stories of the Best Lost, Tossed, and Found Items from Around the World

The average rating for Requiem for a Paper Bag: Celebrities and Civilians Tell Stories of the Best Lost, Tossed, and Found Items from Around the World based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-04 00:00:00 Richard Cleveland This is the most disgustingly white upper-middle-class thing I have ever read. The charming detritus that appears in each issue of Found is replaced here by unnecessarily long essays about encountering other people's cast-off stuff, nearly all of them capped off by some cloying moral about how the stuff we find says as much about ourselves as it does about other people or some crap like that. Sweet Christ, there's even a work of short fiction about a dude trying to remember a wild party by looking at a photo, then realizing he's gay. Found Magazine works because there is no context. When you get a bunch of pretentious people to write endless speculation on what the context for all these objects may have been, you destroy everything that made Found worth buying. Found Magazine made me more interested in other people; this anthology makes me hate them.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-04 00:00:00 Ray Miller Sadly, the more I read this book the less I liked it. Found Magazine is really fun -- it's actual images of the stuff people have found. It makes you wonder about the stories behind the stuff. This book seemed to be more of the same, but with the finder's story of finding or wondering. What it often ended up being, though, was a gaudy, juvenile, sometimes morbidly obsessed romp through other people's belongings and lives. For example, one finder was walking down the sidewalk and came upon a house with a front yard filled with all the stuff of someone's life. He and his girlfriend stood there, wondering if they could dig into it, until another couple came up and dove in. I've worked with enough people who have been evicted unwillingly that this disturbs me quite a bit. Sometimes the stories are about a find from the finder's youth, and the essay tells the story of the immature way the finder rejoiced and shared with friends the original owner's story or pain or mistakes. The essay ends with a more reflective, mature view that may regret the way s/he handled the find. That's nice, but aren't they mostly just doing more of the same now? I'll have to see if after reading this I'll still enjoy the magazine, but sadly the fun I expected from the book, at least, was missing.