How things are made A journey through the hidden world of manufacturing

In this entertaining debut report, Minshall, an innovation professor at the University of Cambridge, delves into the complex systems that produce the world's goods and transport them to market. Minshall details the manufacturing processes for myriad products, describing, for instance, how making toilet paper involves cutting down trees with tractor-like harvesting machines and shredding them into wood chips that are transformed into pulp by heat and chemicals before getting "sprayed" onto wire mesh and drying as paper. "Manufacturing... is about making trade-offs," he contends, discussing how one Premier Foods factory produces more than 250,000 cherry Bakewell tarts per day by sacrificing the ability to make a diverse range of goods for more efficiently creating a single product in high quantities. Tracing recent trends in manufacturing and logistics, Minshall notes that Covid-era supply chain disruptions have renewed interest in moving factories closer to consumers, describing how the difficulties of keeping Covid vaccines refrigerated during transportation led some pharmaceutical companies to cram equipment into shipping containers that allow scientists to make vaccines on-site wherever infrastructure can't support cold storage. The complicated hidden backstories of ordinary items fascinate, and the conversational prose keeps the narrative moving even through involved logistical discussions. This will satisfy anyone who's ever wondered where their favorite products come from. Agent: Laura Macdougall, United Agents. (May)

Diving into manufacturing and the modern supply chain. "Throughout every day of your life you will be wearing, consuming, being transported or sheltered by, communicating through or being restored to health by manufactured products," writes Cambridge University scholar Minshall. Yet, he adds, how these products come into being is "largely invisible" to most consumers. Minshall aims to make at least some of the processes visible, and he uses everyday objects to illustrate their complexities. One is toilet paper, which, at a basic level, requires different kinds of wood pulped and then glued together and cut onto rolls at the rate of 14,000 rolls an hour, then serviced by an army of haulers, shippers, clerks, data analysts, and logistics specialists until it arrives on the shelf: "The whole system to make this product requires the brains and brawn of thousands of workers, millions of dollars of investment and the movement of materials and partly finished goods over thousands of miles." That this product is so essential, Minshall adds in passing, explains the perfectly rational hoarding of toilet paper that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, which in turn exposed the many snags inherent in the supply chain, another subject on which he sheds useful light. Move from toilet paper to a more complex product, and the obstacles multiply by orders of magnitude; who knew how many countries were involved in the production of an Airbus-320 plane, all of whose parts--ideally--are perfectly made and assembled? Moving wings from Wales, landing gear from Canada, horizontal tailplanes from Spain, and so forth to the central assembly plant in France involves a massive carbon footprint, and Minshall concludes his illuminating study with how manufacturing might be more efficient and environmentally friendly, in part by keeping at least some of it as local as possible. Readers interested in the hidden workings of the world will be well pleased with Minshall's explorations. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.