Reviews: (by author)

Love, Ann and Jane Drake. Trash Action: A Fresh Look at Garbage. Illus. Mark Thurman. Toronto : Tundra, 2006. ISBN 0-88776-721-4. $14.95. www.tundrabooks.com . 76 pp.

A very well laid, large, quality paperback, Trash Action is also a very interesting read.

Concepts of conserving and saving on all kinds of items are made concrete through tables, graphs, cartoons, and photographs. Suggestions are provided for cleaning up your life-suggestions that are possible to do, such as taking your own biodegradable plastic bags to the grocery store. Interspersed are self-quizzes, fiction, folklore, and a look at why some civilizations failed: they misused their resources. The design makes the book inviting. Mike Thurman's watercolors and inks are humorous assets to the text. The 2-page painting on 50-51 shows the cycle of trash and recycling to power a town's homes. And sometimes his paintings are just plain lovely, like the sand cranes on p. 47. This is a very good buy for the classroom, since it is all of the above and also contains group projects.

A. Allison, October 2006

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