  | Full Text Reviews: School Library Journal - 01/01/2010 K-Gr 2— A fictionalized account of real events that occurred in 1987, this story will convince young readers to take their recycling efforts more seriously. When Islip, NY, has nowhere to put 3168 tons of garbage, the town officials decide that shipping them south is the right thing to do, so a tugboat towing a garbage-laden barge takes it to North Carolina. But North Carolina won't allow the vessel to dock. It goes on to New Orleans, but again is denied harbor rights. Then it is on to Mexico, Belize, Texas, Florida, and back to New York. The garbage is ripening all along the way. Now even Islip refuses to take it back. Finally a judge orders Brooklyn to take it and incinerate it, 162 days after the barge started its journey. Islip is ordered to take the remains to their landfill. The illustrations are photographs of objects made from garbage. The people, full of personality and expression, were made from polymer clay, and wire, wood scraps, and leftover materials of all kinds were used for the tugboat and barge. The inside of the paper jacket explains how the art was done. This title should be a part of every elementary school ecology unit.—Ieva Bates, Ann Arbor District Library, MI - Copyright 2010 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Booklist - 02/15/2010 Winter, whose You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! (2009) was graced by some of the year’s most dazzling artwork, returns with another uniquely illustrated picture book. He takes the story from a 1987 incident in which a Long Island town decided to send more than 3,000 tons of trash down to North Carolina. In Winter’s fictionalized account, Cap’m Duffy of the tugboat Break of Dawn is saddled with hauling the garbage down south but gets turned away from port after port, all the way down to Belize. While Winter’s folksy, storyteller’s voice captures the scruffy spirit of the adventure with plenty of humor, the artwork by Red Nose Studio steals this show. Photographs of polymer-clay models and found materials (including, you guessed it, piles of trash) have the same uncanny-but-fun allure of Claymation videos, and if it’s not exactly endearing, that’s fine—a book about a stinky pile of garbage has no business being prettied up. Just in case the moral isn’t clear, a buoy helpfully spells it out, “Don’t make so much garbage!!!” - Copyright 2010 Booklist. Bulletin for the Center... - 04/01/2010 Way back in the day-well, 1987-before going green carried its current cachet, the Long Island city of Islip attempted to ship an enormous load of trash south for burial in farmers’ fields. The interment never took place, though; every possible resting place that got whiff of the approaching trash turned it away, and the barge, a sort of Flying Dutchman of refuse, sailed the Eastern shore in search of a place to dump its load. Winter offers a fictionalized version of this episode, turning the absurdity into a serio-comic tour de force. The brain trust behind the operation has been recast here as one Gino Stroffolino, an oily character who claims to “know a guy” in every possible port, but who can’t seal a deal to help Cap’m Duffy of the ill-fated tugboat complete his job. Illustrations are supplied by Red Nose Studio (and kids who peek at the “How I Created the Illustrations” storyboard on the reverse of the jacket will want to know exactly who Red Nose is), and their 3-D whimsy is the perfect complement to Winter’s text. Expressive heads of baked clay are mounted on bendable bodies (the Cap’m Duffy has five heads to match his shifting moods) that strike poses in settings composed of odds and ends. The result is a dramatically lit environment reminiscent of a Nick Park (creator of Wallace and Gromit) production, packed with visual delights. An introductory note that comments on the original garbage barge should inspire kids to further research, or at least to consider their own contributions to the landfill. EB - Copyright 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Loading...
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