GIFTS FROM THE GARBAGE TRUCK

A tribute to a New York City sanitation worker who salvaged a museum’s worth of treasures from the trash.

Though actual glimpses of the thousands of antique toys, old family portraits, and other evocative artifacts that Nelson Molina gathered over the course of his long career are limited to a paltry few photos at the end, his message that our castoff junk is rich in things that can be usefully recycled or upcycled comes through strongly in this brief biographical account. Following an appeal from Molina himself to search for the beauty and value in everything, even garbage, Larsen looks back to his subject’s youth in East Harlem. The author links the pleasure that Molina took in building birdhouses from discarded bits of lumber and repairing a broken toy truck for his little brother to later years on the job—arranging reclaimed items first in a locker room and then expanding into larger quarters as the first few finds grew into thousands. Vidal’s tidy, pleasant scenes of Molina hauling trash and sifting through garbage are implausibly clean and uncrowded. Still, suggestions for personal ways to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink” at the end invite readers to carry on the good work. Molina writes that his parents were from Puerto Rico; figures in group scenes are racially diverse.

Bags up a worthy takeaway about finding beauty in the most unlikely of places.