Dwight Garner at the NY Times:
“Trash!” has been compared to “Kitchen Confidential” (2000), Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant kitchen exposé. Usually, comparisons to Bourdain are fatuous. This time it’s accurate.
Paré-Poupart has the same strangled, exasperated voice. His difficult blue-collar job, like Bourdain’s, is his life: He’s not slumming it for a book deal. Like Bourdain, he raises the blinds on his industry, noting for example the rude exploits garbage guys (the industry is heavily male) sometimes get up to when they go on their runs under cover of night, honking, driving too fast, scraping parked cars and high-tailing it out of there.
Like Bourdain, too, Paré-Poupart is in love with almost all of it: the battlefield camaraderie, the dark humor, the brutal physical demands, the renegade outré style of many of the workers. Bourdain took a vow of social poverty because of the hours he worked. Paré-Poupart took one because his job means he’s barely tolerated in polite society.
more here.
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