I read the article in Harper’s that preceded this book some years back on the North Shore of Lake Superior on a rainy autumn day. It was a beautifully told and fascinating story about a shipping container filled with these rubber duckies that slides from a ship in the middle of the Pacific, I think, and begin popping up on beaches around the world. I’ve been forever blown away by a description of an area (hundreds of?) miles in diameter some where in the Pacific where plastic (and other) garbage comes together in the currents, almost coagulates – plastic bottles, shopping bags, laundry baskets, and on and on and on. Yum.