If you’ve ever seen an object on the side of the road or fished something from a dumpster or a trash pile, then you’ve engaged in mongo. In the traditional sense, mongo is any object that been discarded but now retrieved. Mongo can either be for profit or pleasure (or sometimes both). Mongo culture comes with many different subdivisions: people mongo for food, books, furniture, car parts, antiques, or just for decoration. For some, mongo is their only way of surviving, and for others, it’s a side project. Ted Botha’s Mongo is look into this often-invisible subculture.

Botha covers pretty much all areas of mongo in New York City. There are the freegans, those who forage for food thrown away but that is still edible. There are book hunters who scour alleyways and stoops for piles of material that can be resold for a few bucks. There are those who dig up backyards to find hidden treasures from the 19th century. And then there are those can’t bear to see anything thrown away and keep trinkets for themselves. These variations on a theme give New York an even richer character than previously seen.

I found this book immensely intriguing. My mother used to scour European junkyards and flea markets for pieces for our house and many times, she came back with large, grungy items only to restore them to a perfectly respectable state. Treasures can be found in another person’s trash, but one must be judicious and patient. Botha’s interpretation of mongo culture is with a sympathetic eye as he is a collector himself. His prose clips along nicely and is all at once funny, interesting, descriptive, and kind. After reading this one, you’ll never look at trash in the same way again. ( )

According to the author, "mongo" is a New York expression for any discarded object that is retrieved. It's an entertaining book about people who scrounge stuff from the streets of New York (under them, too) and the reasons they do it. From "canners" who live by gathering and selling cans, to a man who knows wood and uses parts from demolished buildings to do renovations, to a woman who learned how to work on computers by working on ones she found on the street, to a man who gets stone pieces from demolished buildings (five trailers full), this is a great look at the world of mongo. I've picked up furniture left on sidewalks but the people described here who dig in excavated construction sites or who sift through sewage are way, way beyond that. ( )

Look it up in a dictionary and you'll find lots of different meanings for "mongo", but in this title it refers to anything salvaged, usually from trash. It is a fun trip around New York City meeting and salvaging with a large variety of people with different interests and styles. We all have probably seen "canners", those who collect and recycle cans for money, but this goes way beyond that! One of my favorites, of course, is the man who walks around town with his wagon, filling it up with free books he finds discarded. Then he goes home and rests, naps, relaxes, and is back at it in the afternoon, selling everything he found that morning. His policy is to keep very little, if any, of what he finds. There is the standard story about freegans as well as anarchists and artists who make art from trash. Another man watches remodeling sites for discards, and walks off with the pantry door from Jackie Kennedy's apartment, while another manages to snag an old confessional from the Vatican, which he has shipped to NYC and installed as an elevator in a home. It would be great to follow up reading this with Not Buying It - a story of a year of not buying anything. ( )

http://www.book-blog.com/2007/11/botha-ted-mongo.html ( )