Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City

The U.S. generates more waste than any other country in the world, and New York City alone creates more than 12,000 tons of solid waste and recyclables every day, all of which is then spirited away as though by magic. Of course, the only magic at work is an army of nearly 10,000 sanitation workers. In Picking Up, Robin Nagle takes readers on an unusual and enlightening journey into the heart of the City of New York's Department of Sanitation. 

With a military-like discipline, the DSNY relies on an intricate network of camaraderie and bureaucracy rarely glimpsed by outsiders. Nagle has spent 10 years observing the "garbage faeries" who devote hours of back-breaking labor to keeping New York's streets clean. She even took on the job herself, learning terms such as "garbage juice" and the less self-explanatory "mungo" the hard way. In her chronicle of life on the truck, Nagle lays out not only the cringe-inspiring details of the city's most dangerous job, but how the conditions have changed over the centuries, including streets full of dross and roaming livestock in the mid-1600s and a state of filth that threatened to create a public health crisis in the 1890s.

This frank and respectful look at a coterie of society's most unsung heroes will forever change the way you think about your neighborhood sanitation workers and compel you to consider where we would be without them. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads

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