Review by New York Times Review
GARBAGE shame is such a normal part of today's parental discourse ("No, you can't have an AquaPod! It's a waste of packaging!") that most of us don't think about it anymore. Landfills leak climate-changing methane. Plastic water bottles stretch to the moon and back. "Here Comes the Garbage Barge!" traces the origin of increased trash awareness, at least on the Eastern Seaboard, to 1987, when the tale of a tugboat and its unhappy haul gripped a nation in the midst of a slow news cycle. It started when the Long Island town of Islip, overcome by its own refuse, shipped 3,168 tons of it down the Atlantic coast, with a plan to dump it in some farmers' backyards. But North Carolina turned the barge away, as did Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Florida; Mexico and Belize sent out their militaries to keep the barge offshore. The barge returned and spent the summer stinking up New York Harbor while politicians wrangled, onlookers gaped and comedians cracked wise. Six months after its sorry tale began, the barge finally unloaded at a Brooklyn incinerator. The story turns uplifting only after it ends: the incessant news coverage helped inspire Americans to pay more attention to their trash, ushering in the recycling era. "Here Comes the Garbage Barge!," which is based on this story (while taking many comical liberties with it) doesn't hide its Oscar the Grouch-style affection for trash. The illustrator, Chris Sickels of the Red Nose Studio in Indiana, ingeniously employs found materials to construct 3-D sculptures, which he then photographs in front of luminous painted backdrops. The charmingly sea-worn tug is constructed from leather belts, pieces of metal screen and old windshield wipers; the barge itself, built from cardboard and wood, is laden with gumball-machine-size toys and plastic-draped scraps. It's I Spy for budding Dumpster divers. The characters have wire bodies, handstitched clothes and exaggerated clay features that evoke stop-motion favorites from Gumby to "Wallace & Gromit." Two fictionalized dames looking out from the North Carolina shoreline have bright blue hair and retro-modernist dresses; a clay model Statue of Liberty in front of a searchlight moon holds her nose. Sickels depicts the garbage's deterioration by adding old banana peels and shellac. Tiny flies buzz against a sickeningly yellowing sky. The author, Jonah Winter, specializes in transforming hard-luck, even brutal, real-life stories into snappy, digestible kid-lit. His picturebook biographies of Frida Kahlo, Dizzy Gillespie and Sandy Koufax have handled delicate issues like depression, racism and physical abuse. ("He was always mad," Winter wrote of young Gillespie. "You see, his dad was always beating on him, and there was nothing he could do.") But here, his tone cloys. Duffy St. Pierre, the tug's "Cap'm," spews corny interjections like "Ahoy" and "Hard a-starboard"; he's alternately cheerful and aggrieved but never develops an actual personality. Fictionalized sleazebags spout "dis" and "dat" A Belize soldier, beneath a banana-shaped banner (cringe!), has a toucan on his head. "Here Comes the Garbage Barge!" is a glorious visual treat, but as an inspirational tale, it feels weirdly inconclusive; it wants to celebrate garbage and wag a finger at the same time. "Moral: Don't make so much garbage!!!" barks the endpaper. Sickels's adorable floating detritus - a miniature Playbill, Rubik's Cube and dollhouse table, cast in a sea of dry-cleaner blue plastic sheeting - muddies the message. A tale of a barge carrying 3,168 tons of garbage that couldn't find a home. Karen Schoemer is the author of "Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair With '50s Pop Music."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 14, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
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!!! --Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The message is the medium in this zany fictionalized version of the 1987 story of a garbage-laden barge that left Long Island for North Carolina after local landfills closed. To create the book's innovative artwork, Red Nose Studio, aka artist Chris Sickels, photographed sets he fashioned from recycled materials, found objects, and garbage (the characters are made from acrylic clay). He chronicles this process on the inside of the jacket-a crafty double use of paper in keeping with the theme. Winter's (Barack) bombastic narrative exposes the folly of the six-month journey, as the "Cap'm" of the tug pulling the stinky barge is turned away from port after port. Winter revels in dialogue throughout ("Dere's dis guy down in Mexico-he owes me a favor," the captain's boss tells him), and the artwork is equally gleeful (in Florida, elderly residents floating in inner tubes angrily shake their fists, refusing to let the barge dock). Though kids aren't likely to miss the message, a sign on a buoy shouts it out: "Moral: Don't make so much garbage!!!" Funky in every sense of the word. Ages 4-8. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
After a Long Island town puts its unwanted garbage on a barge, North Carolina is the first of several ports to refuse it. Told with asides to the reader and stuffed with comical accents and spiky dialogue ("What the hairy heck?"), this uproarious book, based on a true 1987 incident, features remarkable illustrations created from, appropriately enough, recycled materials. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A stinky story never seemed so sweet. Winter tackles the true-life tale of the 1987 Garbage Barge fiasco in this entirely amusing mix of fact and fiction.When the city of Islip on Long Island ends up with too much garbage, some businessmen (merged into a single character here named Gino Stroffolino) decide the best solution is to ship it to a distant Southern contact.Trouble arises when the barge and stalwart Cap'm Duffy St. Pierre find themselves turned away at every port. From North Carolina to Mexico, from New Orleans to Belize, nobody wants the garbageall 3,168 tons of it.The author has fun with this story, and his jovial tall-tale tone is well complemented by the eye-popping clay models provided by Red Nose Studio. The garbage in this book doesn't just stinkit oozes and melts in the hot summer sun. A fantastic combination of text and image, this is sure to give the barge and story the infamy they deserve for a generation far too young to recall either the actual incident or the bad old days before we all recycled. (Picture book. 4-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
