JUNK: Digging Through America’s Love Affair With Stuff

JUNK_book_jacket Hardcover – April 1, 2016
JUNK: Digging Through America’s Love Affair with Stuff details Stewart’s journey into the country’s basements, closets and garages as she attempts to better understand why Americans can’t seem to keep their stuff under control. Stewart looks closely at how people define their junk by wading through hoarders’ homes, investigating a 250-mile-long yard sale and visiting the “Cathedral of Junk,” a three-story high art sculpture made from old and discarded items. She examines the big business that junk has generated, riding along with junk removal teams named Trash Daddy, Annie Haul and Junk Vets, interviewing professional organizers and talking to consumers that believe The Container Store will solve all of their problems. She goes backstage at Antiques Roadshow… MORE
“Finally, a book that explains my lava lamp, boxes of cassette tapes, and three pairs of clogs. Thank you, Alison Stewart! This book is overdue, and I promise not to put it on one of my piles.”

— Hoda Kotb, co-host of the Today Show
MORE

“To my dear beloved survivors: when you one day clean out my basement, you’ll find a copy of Alison Stewart’s Junk. Sit down on the pile of New Yorkers, turn on that halogen floor lamp I used in college, crack open a can of Jolt Cola (you’ll find about three cases), and read about why all the stuff around you isn’t necessarily junk —except for that stack of VHS tapes. That’s just crap.”

— Mo Rocca, correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning and host of Your Grandmother’s Ravioli
MORE

“Somebody’s going to say it, so let me be the first: Junk is a treasure. It’s an enlightening look into our modern world featuring space garbage, spam, and chicken-shaped table lamps. Buy it, read it, and store it in the attic.”

— A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically
MORE

“If you suspect that you are holding onto things that hold you back in your life, you want to read Junk by Alison Stewart. Whether they are the physical items stuck in a drawer or ideas stuck in your head, Junk will make you think about what you keep and why.”

— Cheryl Hunter, Life Coach and author of Lose It: Turn Setbacks into Success
MORE

BOOKS
FIRST CLASS: The Legacy of Dunbar,
America’s First Black Public High School
first_class_2016
review-stars

First Class tells the extraordinary history of the first black public high school in the United States, from its humble beginnings in a church basement during Reconstruction, to its pinnacle as an academic powerhouse rivaling the elite white public and private institutions in spite of and oddly due to segregation, to its rapid descent to an overlooked chaotic urban school with some of the worst …

MORE

WORK
pbs-news-hour

NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff joins Alison Stewart from Des Moines, Iowa, to discuss the 2016 Iowa caucuses.

bryant-part

The Bryant Park Project, as co-hosted by Alison Stewart and Luke Burbank in more than two dozen pilots, mixes big doses of levity with a news sensibility favoring alternate takes on the day’s top stories.