”Here Comes the Garbage Barge!” by Jonah Winter, $18, ages 4 to 8
Jonah Winter’s book helps kids get a grip on what we toss out instead of recycling.
He tells a fictional version of a real story that occurred in 1987, when a town on New York’s Long Island had no place to put its garbage.
In Winter’s tale, the job falls to Cap’m Duffy and his scruffy tugboat. He hitches a barge piled with 3,168 tons of garbage and heads down the coast to a dumping site in North Carolina.
However, on arrival, two old sisters in red dresses smell the barge a-comin’ and call the police. No dice, the police say. Cap’m Duffy waits for days before his boss orders him on to New Orleans.
Foiled again. Orders come for Mexico, then Belize. By now it’s been six weeks, the garbage stinks and Cap’m Duffy, wearing a gas mask, tells his boss he’s ready to quit.
Even the Statue of Liberty holds her nose when the sad little tugboat pulls its load back to where it started.
Chris Sickels of Red Nose Studio uses found objects, aka garbage, to create amazing 3-D scenes. For the characters, he made faces from polymer clay baked in an oven.
”Emma’s Poem, The Voice of the Statue of Liberty” by Linda Glaser, $17, ages 5 to 8
Linda Glaser has written a story in verse about a woman you may know only by her words, “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”
Lazarus wrote those words in 1883 in her poem “The New Colossus.” It was part of a fundraising effort for the statue’s pedestal. Lazarus grew up in a comfortable Jewish family in New York and developed compassion for the immigrants.
Ignoring her peers’ contempt for immigrants, she worked to improve their lives. Glaser’s spare verse, with folk art-style paintings by Claire A. Nivola, remind us we live in the land of immigrants.
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