Kyle Wiens
"Our relationship with our stuff needs fixing. As Sandra Goldmark brilliantly explains, we have been unwittingly coerced into buying new products over used. Transitioning to a healthier model of consumption isn't just needed to save our planet—it's needed to save our humanity."
Cynthia Li
"Through innovation and invitation, Fixation challenges us to rethink 'stuff.' The stuff we use, the stuff we don't use, and the relationships we have to all this stuff. Goldmark's candor, humor, and rich references raise questions for personal healing at the bedroom-closet level to a social revolution on a global scale. An important read for dynamic times like these."
Post and Courier
Goldmark…has thought long and hard about what can be done to transform our linear economies into more circular ones that not only recycle and repair products, but make more durable ones…Goldmark’s proposed solutions—practical, political, cultural—seem quite doable, given the will.”
Booklist
"This is a moral, physical, and metaphysical exploration into material culture."
David Sax
"Goldmark argues eloquently, with a dose of both Pollan and Schumacher, that our scattered household junk holds a far greater value (and danger) than we think. Fixation will make you view the greater world in a broken toaster, and hopefully inspire you to care enough to help make it whole again."
KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz
"For brands and businesses searching for a clear path to sustainable growth in today's complex and challenged world, Fixation is required reading. Goldmark's fresh perspective on the need for new economic models and circular systems presents a convincing argument—and a real roadmap—for fruitful solutions and meaningful change."
Wingnut
[Goldmark] wants us to buy fewer things, things that are built to last, and fix those things when they break…A really good idea…this book has a broad reach.
Resilience
"A copy of Fixation is one of the best gifts you could give or receive…Getting beyond this unsustainable economy will require changes in attitudes, changes in education, changes in the manufacturing and retail changes, changes in wage allocations. Goldmark addresses all of these weighty subjects in beautifully accessible ways."
Kirkus Reviews
2020-07-16
A professor of professional practice champions social and political change that will reshape our economies into a circular model that protects the planet—and us.
This is a carefully researched and closely reasoned critique of consumerism, resource depletion, cheap labor, waste, and the ruinous belief in unbridled growth. In 2013, Goldmark employed her skills as a theatrical set and costume designer to open a series of short-term pop-up repair shops in New York City, discovering more sustainable ways of utilizing the “stuff” we too often discard. The author clearly educated herself on the many complex threads of local, national, and global issues involved in the promotion of rampant consumerism. She demonstrates how our linear manufacturing model inevitably creates monumental waste, not just planned obsolescence, and how durability and ease of repair seldom enter the equation. The real environmental tab is the energy we waste and the human costs of cheap labor. Goldmark places responsibility not just with corporations, but also with the consumer. Paraphrasing Michael Pollan’s guidelines on eating, she advocates buying well-made, durable products, not too many, mostly reclaimed, caring for them and, when possible, passing them on. Beyond individual behavior, some of the author’s proposed systemic solutions are sound. However, she sometimes clouds her arguments with sermons on the myth of the American West and religion, sounding like a left-leaning urban ideologue who brooks no argument with her interpretation of the facts. Some matters are more complicated than she would have it. Insofar as the big picture is concerned—countering excessive consumerism, transforming capitalism’s eternal growth ethic into something more reasonable—one fears that the author is up against a tide that will refuse to wane until it’s too late. Nonetheless, at least she’s trying, as are others, to educate and inspire change. Many of Goldmark’s narrative threads are ripe for further study.
A sturdy argument that small choices can lay a foundation for larger collective shifts.
