Trash!

<b>“Raffish and spirited . . . a nonconformist cri de coeur . . .  Usually, comparisons to Bourdain are fatuous. This time it’s accurate . . . It’s been a long time since I’ve read so good and rowdy a memoir about blue-collar work.”<i> — </i>Dwight Garner,<i> The New York Times</i><br> <br>A Montreal garbageman's sharp and funny memoir/exposé, in which he attempts to convince people to "stop imagining that your garbage magically disappears" . . .</b><br><br>This fascinating no-bullshit account of twenty years in waste management paints a vivid portrait of the heroic labor, anarchic spirit, and violent conditions of the people who keep our cities clean.<br><br>Paré-Poupart’s story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for school, and after earning graduate degrees and working in more “respectable” fields, he is still on a truck — out of love for the physical rush, for his rough-and-tumble colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him.<br><br>Includes eight black and white photographs of the author on the job. <br><br>His sociology background informs his inquiry into our collective wastefulness and individual failure to confront the trash we produce. Every abstract observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route to his days off spent hunting down furniture and toys for family and friends, as a committed freegan.<br><br><i>Trash!</i> — the French edition of which is a runaway bestseller in Canada — explains and questions efforts to “clean up” a business with longstanding conventions of its own, a last bastion of well-paid employment for people who cannot fit in anywhere else.<br><br>Aligned with great books about work from Zola to Orwell to Lucia Berlin, and in dialogue with societal critiques like <i>How To Do Nothing, Trash!</i> will change how you think about your waste and the people who handle it.