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Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City
From the publisher: "America's largest city generates garbage in torrents - 11,000 tons a day on average. But New Yorkers don't give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. And why not? On a schedule so regular you could almost set your watch by it, someone always comes to take it away. But who, exactly, is that someone? And why is he - or she - so unknown? Robin Nagle introduces us to the men and women of New York City's Department of Sanitation and makes clear why this small army of uniformed workers is the most important labor force on the streets. But the more time she spent with the DSNY, the more Nagle realized that observing wasn't quite enough - so she joined the force herself."
About the Book
“Meticulous . . . [Nagle’s] passion for the subject really comes to life.” ―The New York Times
New York City produces more than twelve thousand tons of household trash and recyclables a day. As quickly as it accumulates, it’s hauled away. But who makes that happen? What’s life like for the workers with careers built around garbage?
In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle takes us inside New York City’s Department of Sanitation, a largely unseen and often unloved army responsible for keeping the city alive. Nagle spent a decade with sanitation people of all ranks to learn what it takes to manage Gotham’s garbage. She even took the job herself, driving trucks and plowing snow while enduring the physical aches, public abuse, and risk of injury that are constant realities of the job. Nagle offers an insider’s perspective on the complex hierarchies, intricate rules, and obscure language unique to this mostly invisible world.
Not just a contemporary account, Picking Up charts New York City’s four-hundred-year struggle with trash. It traces the city’s waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to today’s far more vigorous practices, which have made the city cleaner than it’s been in decades.
Complete with vividly evoked characters and memorable descriptions of the sights and smells of the job, Picking Up reveals the vital role sanitation workers play in every city across the globe.
Other books in "Quick Lit January 2020"
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