CRASHED, SMASHED, AND MASHED

Junkyards in the US and Canada receive 12 million vehicles a year, and here the creators of Tractor Trailer Trucker: A Powerful Truck Book (2000) follow one typical junker from its arrival on a big flatbed to its eventual rendezvous with a truly humongous car shredder. In sharp, artfully angled, color photos, Borns records the stops along the way, as seven kinds of fluids are drained, its tires join a "sea of tires" awaiting recycling, reusable parts are torched off, battery and radio are removed, and what's left is mashed into a two-foot-high metal pancake in preparation for its final mastication. The Vermont salvage yard where most of these pictures were taken even has an electronic inventory database, and much of what can't be resold is systematically recycled. Mitchell imbues her captioning text with breezy exuberance ("Out With the Mashed . . . In With the Smashed"), and closes with a glossary, a page of statistics, and even a list of Web sites. Junkyards have always been as much a kind of rusty Magic Kingdom as a source of cut-rate car parts; children will want to take this memorable tour more than once. (Picture book/nonfiction. 5-8)