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Customer Review
Product Description
“Patrolling the neighborhoods of central Fort Worth, sorting through trash piles, exploring dumpsters, scanning the streets and the gutters for items lost or discarded, I gathered the city's degraded bounty, then returned home to sort and catalogue the take.”
—From the Introduction
In December of 2001 Jeff Ferrell quit his job as tenured professor, moved back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, and, with a place to live but no real income, began an eight-month odyssey of essentially living off of the street. Empire of Scrounge tells the story of this unusual journey into the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and second-hand living. Existing as a dumpster diver and trash picker, Ferrell adopted a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. Riding around on his scrounged BMX bicycle, Ferrell investigated the million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle class suburbs, industrial and commercial strips, and the large downtown area, where he found countless discarded treasures, from unopened presents and new clothes to scrap metal and even food.
Richly illustrated throughout, Empire of Scrounge is both a personal journey and a larger tale about the changing values of American society. Perhaps nowhere else do the fault lines of inequality get reflected so clearly than at the curbside trash can, where one person's garbage often becomes another's bounty. Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption. With landfills overflowing, today’s highly disposable culture produces more trash than ever before—and yet the urge to consume seems limitless.
In the end, while picking through the city's trash was often dirty and unpleasant work, unearthing other people's discards proved to be unquestionably illuminating. After all, what we throw away says more about us than what we keep.
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Found This Book Under a Heap of Trash
Ha! Just kidding, found it under the Christmas tree where my wife placed it, but someday some lucky scrounger will find it(not my copy) in a used bookstore Dumpster and it will smite them upon the pate with the serendipidous force of a Zen koan. It's a philosophical look at a life lived on the margins of society, with great attention paid to the ambiguities of public/private property, the ever changing cultural definition of criminal behavior/thriftiness. I loved the section where the author discussed the flip side of the canard,"Time is money." If you opt out of the commercial world of money and consumerism then the pace of your life slows way down and you become firmly rooted in the here and now. Along the way Ferrell introduces the reader to some very savy scroungers. Listen to Leslie Hemstreet of Chadron Nebraska:"There's nothing that makes you feel a temporary merging of the parallel universes more than being a vegetarian driving...
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January 3, 2006
(Carrboro, NC United States) | Helpful Votes: 17 | Rating: 4
Interesting read
I found this book rather interesting and a bit depressing. His writing style was very different and honestly had a very difficult time making it through the first two chapters but eased into by the third.Amazing eye opening discussion on waste in America.I have foraged a bit for discarded items and am constantly amazed at the amount of waste that people create. Perfectly good items that are just tossed. Books, clothing, tools, furnishings, etc are tossed on a daily basis, on it's was to a landfill. What's sad is that many Americans are even unwilling to donate these items to a charity because it's just too much effort.
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June 6, 2007
(Renton, WA USA) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 4
Excellent first-hand experience in the dry consumer wasteland
I discovered this book while I was visiting Fort Worth in December of 2005, after a job had ended and I made my default pilgrimage to see my parents. During those strange days of bright warmth unusual even for Texas, I drove streets and haunts Ferrell describes with piquant accuracy: the sheet metal fences of Rosedale's scrap metal yards, the deep green live oak shade of middle-moneyed Ridglea and Arlington Heights, the gravel alleys and nondescript shacks of urban backyards--one of which hid his illegal recycling operation under pecan trees. While I was in college I lived some of this life, picking up abandoned car batteries and random lumps of metal, dumping rancid soda out of the cans left in the lone recycling barrel I set up at my college, even fishing appliances out of creeks--hauling it all to those same metal yards for respectable pocket money.Ferrell's opening chapters clearly appeal to academic readers, describing the social relationships between waste, the...
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February 24, 2010
| Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4
A life (or should I say nose) saver!