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

Nagle (anthropology & urban studies, New York Univ.) has devoted much of her professional life to the study of garbage! Here she explores the New York City workers who have the Sisyphean task of collecting more than 11,000 tons of household trash daily. Through an absorbing first-person journey as a "san man" herself, she weaves a narrative of personal encounters with fellow workers who have shared both hilarious and harrowing on-the-job accounts. She points out the enormous challenges confronting the garbage collectors, known as "sanitation engineers," as they face hazards that can cause injury or even death. (She notes that New York's sanitation workers are well compensated.) One of the more edifying tales is how the cleanup of the New Year's Eve ball-drop in Times Square is so efficiently accomplished. She combines such stories with a broader historic sweep of the efforts to keep New York's streets clean, from Colonial times to the present. As one of Nagle's colleagues reminds us, we may never need a police officer or firefighter, but "we will need a sanitation worker every day."