Junk: Digging Through America's Love Affair with Stuff

by Alison Stewart

Overview

Junk has become ubiquitous in America today. Who doesn’t have a basement, attic, closet, or storage unit filled with stuff too good to throw away? Or, more accurately, stuff you think is too good to throw away.

When journalist and author Alison Stewart was confronted with emptying her late parents’ overloaded basement, a job that dragged on for months, it got her thinking: How did it come to this? Why do smart, successful people hold on to old Christmas bows, chipped knick-knacks, VHS tapes, and books they would likely never reread? She discovered she was not alone.

Junk details Stewart’s three-year investigation into America’s stuff, lots and lots and lots of stuff. Stewart rides along with junk removal teams from around the country such as Trash Daddy, Annie Haul, and Junk Vets. She goes backstage to a taping of Antiques Roadshow, and learns what makes for compelling junk-based television with the executive producer of Pawn Stars. And she even investigates the growing problem of space junk—23,000 pieces of manmade debris orbiting the planet at 17,500 mph, threatening both satellites and human space exploration.

But it’s not all dire. There are creative solutions to America’s overburdened consumer culture. Stewart visits with Deron Beal, founder of FreeCycle, an online community of people who would rather give away than throw away their no-longer-needed possessions. She spends a day at a Repair Café, where volunteer tinkerers bring new life to broken appliances, toys, and just about anything. Stewart also explores communities of “tiny houses” without attics and basements in which to stash the owners’ trash.
           
Junk is a delightful journey through 250-mile-long yard sales, and packrat dens, both human and rodent, that for most readers will look surprisingly familiar.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613730553
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alison Stewart is an award-winning journalist whose twenty-year career includes anchoring and reporting for NPR, NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News. She got her start covering politics for MTV News, and is currently a PBS correspondent and host. Stewart is a graduate of Brown University. 

Editorial Reviews

05/01/2016
When journalist and author Stewart (First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School) must clear out her late parents' full basement, she is prompted to explore the topic of junk. Traveling the Southern multistate Highway 411 Yard Sale, she witnesses that one's person's trash is another's treasure. In Arizona, the author learns about the furry creatures known as pack rats that fill their nests with random items. In various cities, she rides along with entrepreneurs whose businesses haul away people's possessions. Stewart contemplates phrases that incorporate the word "junk," such as junk mail, and meets the sender of the first spam email. She presents transcripts of her interviews with a former NASA scientist dedicated to the issue of space junk, the executive producer of the television show Pawn Stars (about a Las Vegas pawnshop), the creator of the sculpture known as the Cathedral of Junk in Austin, TX, and the founder of the FreeCycle Network. She checks out tiny houses with little space and repair cafés where volunteers attempt to fix broken items. VERDICT Stewart's compelling and readable book is for those who are fascinated by stuff and are in search of something other than decluttering or organization manuals.—Janet Clapp, N. Clarendon, VT

Library Journal

2016-02-03
Quirky, immersive report on the "who, what, where, when, and why of junk." After spending months painstakingly sifting through knickknack boxes in her parents' basement after the sale of the family home, journalist and TV host Stewart (First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School, 2013) contemplated the nature of obsession, nostalgia, and our compulsive reliance on personal "stuff." Her entertaining three-year exploration spans U.S. Route 411 from central Alabama to Tennessee, a stretch of Southern highway that becomes a 250-mile-long yard sale teeming with hives of eccentrics and their roadside tchotchke stands during a four-day autumnal "junk-a-palooza." There, and throughout the many homes and storage units she examined, Stewart understood that "the key element of true junk is worthlessness." However, behind the dusty boxes and overstuffed bins are real people; some harbor serious psychological impairments, while others seem trapped in a collection cycle, surrounding and guarding themselves with a disposable, ever expanding bloom of ephemera. "Letting go is a common problem for people who have attachments to things they know they no longer need but secretly still like or even love," the author writes as more complicated issues of compulsive hoarding, loneliness, and disposophobia surface in other sections of her accessible, enthusiastic study. She conducts amusing interviews with experts in the big business of eviction clean-outs, junk removal, and recycling, and she queries the troubled creator of a three-story interconnected colossus of objects and the executive producer of TV's Pawn Stars. Particularly engrossing chapters spotlight groups dedicated to the science intersecting identity and possessions and a NASA expert on intergalactic space junk. In all fairness, Stewart concedes that "what qualifies as junk is subjective," and throughout her lively observations, she consistently remains respectful to those on all levels of the stockpiling spectrum. Absorbing and enjoyably compelling research on the packrat conundrum in our society.

Kirkus Reviews

"Finally, a book that explains my lava lamp, boxes of cassette tapes, and three pairs of clogs. Thank you, Alison Stewart! This book is overdue, and I promise not to put it on one of my piles.” —Hoda Kotb, cohost of the Today Show
 


“To my dear beloved survivors: when you one day clean out my basement, you’ll find a copy of Alison Stewart’s Junk. Sit down on the pile of New Yorkers, turn on that halogen floor lamp I used in college, crack open a can of Jolt Cola (you’ll find about three cases), and read about why all the stuff around you isn’t necessarily junk—except for that stack of VHS tapes. That's just crap.” —Mo Rocca, correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning and host of My Grandmother’s Ravioli

From the Publisher