Customer Reviews

Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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I love this book! It's full of fun, fascinating ways that people incorporate gleaning into their lives. The essays are wonderfully written -- they made me laugh and smile and feel inspired. Best of all, they reminded me of the magical, childlike thrill you get when you discover forgotten or discarded treasures-- or find wildly creative new uses for something like used teabags. The essays also bring you deeper into the issue of how much waste our society creates-- and give you lots of great information to think about and discuss. This book has sparked wonderful conversations between my husband and me-- and the way we interact with all the "stuff" in our lives has changed! For one thing, our trash can fills up much less quickly now...

When I read "going green" I immediately think about companies trying to jump onto the green train and restructuring their daily business processes to be more environmental friendly and improve their triple bottom line. However, "going green" is not a term anymore that is strictly used in an economical context. Quite the opposite is the case. Simply because individuals woke up and realized that the current way of doing business, living our lives, and the way we treat the world we are all living in is not sustainable, this mindset made it into the economy and changed entire business models. I even want to go a step further and say that this new mindset will lead us into a new economic paradigm.

The collection of articles in "Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers" gives us a foretaste of what people are willing to do and how they are willing to change their lifestyle to make a difference. Ok, some might only do it to save money, but if I understand it right, a majority simply does it to protest against the unnecessary and wasteful ways of shops and businesses. A good book to get insights into how more and more mindsets are about to change.

- Frank Roettgers, author of Going Green Together - How to Align Employees with Green Strategies

Gleaning tales! Gleaning from refuse, people, relatives, rich people. Stories full of emotion and desire to do better for the world. Change your life and read this!

I decided to go shamrocks-to-the-wall this St. Patrick's Day. Too many years, I've been left on the wrong side of the rainbow, stuck holding my Irish for a whole 'nother year. This year, I was determined to paint the town -- and myself, if need be, inside and out -- GREEN.

Saint Patrick's Day is all about the 'green', so I bought this book to tell me everything I needed to know about the Irish experience. Right off the bat, the subtitle seemed a little strange: 'Gleaners, Scavengers and Dumpster Divers'? That sounded pretty harsh to me. I mean, sure, they did what they had to do to survive during the Potato Famine -- but that was a long, long time ago. Cut the nation some slack already. And did they even _have_ dumpsters in the mid-1800s? Odd choice.

On top of that, the book didn't tell me much that helped prepare for St. Patrick's Day. It was just a bunch of essays about people foraging through trash and recycling bins and living off what other people throw away. There were no shamrocks or green beer or snake chasers at all. And certainly no pots o' gold to be found.

On the good side, I used what I learned to dig through the dumpster behind my local party supply store, and found a veritable treasure trove of barely-damaged, somewhat-torn, possibly-spat-on and marginally-misspelled holiday goodies. This is going to be the best Santi Partickl's party EVER!!!

Going Green: True tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers (2009) is an anthology, created and edited by a friend/author whose writing I like a lot. So this isn't easy. Some of the essays in this book brought water to my eyes and others, well ... reeked. My complaint is best summed up by quoting from one of the better essays: "... the simplicity of my life at home started to look like loneliness, and its independence snobbery." (pg. 200) So honest! A lot of that lonely, self-importance, and snobbery comes through in many of the essays; and frankly, gives credence to the voices on the other side of the environmental debate. In addition, much of the writing is overdone, and I got so tired of reading the word "gleaned" - I don't think I'll ever again be able to use it in a sentence, written or spoken. That being said - the good essays are well worth the price of the book, and I think it merits a place on all bookshelves.

GOING GREEN: TRUE TALES FROM CLEANERS, SCAVENGERS, AND DUMPSTER DIVERS has gathered the work of over twenty writers who tell their personal accounts of Dumpster driving, eating road kill, salvaging bottles and recycled materials, and more. These stories consider ways in which people can 'go green' and underlying issues of priorities and cultural influences on the process, making for a fine probe of what really defines 'green' actions. General lending libraries will find it intriguing.