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

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

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?

In Picking Up, the anthropologist 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. Seeking to understand every aspect of the Department's mission, Nagle accompanied crews on their routes, questioned supervisors and commissioners, and listened to story after story about blizzards, hazardous waste, and the insults of everyday New Yorkers. 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. Driving the hulking trucks, she obtained an insider's perspective on the complex kinships, arcane rules, and obscure lingo unique to the realm of sanitation workers.

Nagle rivetingly chronicles New York City's four-hundred-year struggle with trash, and traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to the far more rigorous practices of today, when the Big Apple is as clean as it's ever been.

Throughout, Nagle reveals the many unexpected ways in which sanitation workers stand between our seemingly well-ordered lives and the sea of refuse that would otherwise overwhelm us. In the process, she changes the way we understand cities--and ourselves within them.

Nagle, Robin: - Robin Nagle has been the anthropologist-in-residence at New York City's Department of Sanitation since 2006; she is the first person to hold the title. She teaches anthropology and urban studies at New York University, where she also directs the Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought. She is the author of Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City and she lives in Harlem.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780374299293
ISBN 10	0374299293
Title	Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City
Author	Robin Nagle
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Farrar Straus Giroux
Year published	2013-03-19
Number of pages	280
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable