The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: big necessity, manual scavengers, open defecation, Gram Vikas, New York, South Africa (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. With irreverence and pungent detail, George (A Life Removed) breaks the embarrassed silence over the economic, political, social and environmental problems of human waste disposal. Full of fascinating facts about the evolution of material culture as influenced by changing mores of disgust and decency (the popularity of high-heeled shoes dates back to the time when chamber pots were emptied into the streets)—the book shows how even advanced technology doesn't always meet basic needs: using toilet paper is shockingly unhygienic and millions of government-built latrines in developing countries have been turned into goat sheds and spare rooms due to poor design, a lack of regular water supply or simply because the subsidized (and expensive) cement and stone structures are often more appealing than the village huts. George explores how discussions on the importance of clean drinking water and the eradication of infectious diseases euphemistically address how to handle human waste. From the depths of the world's oldest surviving urban sewers in to Japan's robo-toilet revolution, George leads an intrepid, erudite and entertaining journey through the public consequences of this most private behavior. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—London and New York sewer tunnels, Japan's robotic toilet industry, farming innovations in China, and the politics of public sanitation in India—past and present—are treated with forthright investigation, sensitivity to intercultural relations and experiences, and high good humor. The effects of urban living on people who don't have sufficient human-waste disposal systems include not only diseases, but also social constructions that follow them beyond their portable brick latrines and backside-cleansing tools. The privacy that Westerners have grown to insist on as part of the toileting experience hampers travelers in parts of the world where toilet stalls don't have doors, let alone where toilets don't have stalls. George interviewed locals, social reformers, engineers, and bureaucrats in search of filling in the details of the picture she creates, making this a thorough, highly informative, and thought-provoking account. Her writing style is a delight, assuring her a faithful audience even while she discusses topics most commonly left unspoken and unwritten about. Teens may pick this up first for the gross-out factor but will find it a wealth of scientific and political intrigue.—Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805082719
• ISBN-13: 978-0805082715
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #265,065 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #35 in	Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Civil > Environmental > Solid Waste Management

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Open Discussion of a Forbidden Topic, November 14, 2008

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

What if you learned that a particular problem was causing 80% of the illness in the world and was killing a child every fifteen seconds? Would you want to find out more, and insist that governments and the world do more, to improve the problem? What if you learned that one of the big reasons that governments and the world aren't doing more is that the problem is, well, yucky, and people don't like talking or thinking about it? There are blunter words for the problem, and Rose George uses them; the problem is feces. It is the topic of her book _The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste_ (Metropolitan Books), a sobering and eye-opening account of just how badly the world handles this one great and inevitable problem. Most of the people who read this book will be among the set that uses flush commodes which connect to sewers and treatment plants, considered the tops in fecal disposal. But 2.6 billion people lack not only toilets, but also lack latrines or outhouses or even a bucket. Toilets and sewage treatments have their problems, covered here, but with billions of people who literally have no place to go, feces wind up all over the place, easily getting into food and water and causing misery. George has been to sewers of huge cities, wandered excrement-coated slum streets, experimented with public toilets in rural china, and visited the workers who clean sewers or empty pits. There is humor here (not much of the toilet variety) and well-crafted explanation and description, but it is not overall a pretty picture. If you don't want to think about this problem, that's just the problem.

Toilets, if a culture has them, are only a starting point. In the typical sewage system, the flow is eventually separated into the cleaned liquid effluent which goes back into the water and the solid sludge (more trendily called bio-solids) which is a bit of a problem. It is pretty clean, and naturally would make a good fertilizer, and in the US it does get spread around all over. The problem is that anything goes down our toilets, like unused drugs or heavy metals. Those who worry about the application of such molecules onto our crops are not comforted by the Environmental Protection Agency which says such application is safe. A great deal of George's book is not about people with toilets and sewers. In India, the lowest of the class still held to be Untouchables get an income by collecting feces deposited on the open ground. There are flying toilets or helicopter toilets in Kenya and Tanzania. It's a nice way of describing a disgusting practice: defecate into a plastic bag, then fling the bag to a rooftop or into the alley. George cites the Chinese as being especially innovative and open about sanitation; feces have always gone onto the fields there, but more recently homes have been equipped with biogas digesters providing methane that heats homes and stoves. There are still urban problems, but the government knows how important appearances are. In preparation for the Olympics, holes in the ground were replaced with thousands of lavatories, complete with attendants. In South Africa, kids stay away from school because the toilets are so bad; an official school lavatory might be something rigged up from a car chassis.

The descriptions of the lack of waste disposal for so much of the world's population are often difficult reading. There are glimmers of hope such as toilet activists like the World Toilet Organization. An Indian activist, after a visit to Madame Tussaud's in London, realized that he could gather toilets from all over the world and make a Toilet Museum which fulfills his goal to "make toilets interesting." There are inventors in different parts of the world who have gadgets to make sanitation cheaper and easier, and the pattern is to avoid patenting them so that they remain anyone's to use or modify without charge. There are politicians (not nearly enough) who are willing to talk about the unmentionable problem. George's book, with vivid descriptions and bright commentary, does the same thing in its way, forcing attention onto a world problem that people foolishly regard as too icky to take seriously.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining story of toilets, December 15, 2008

By	Margaret Dybala "too many books, too little time" (Pearland, Texas United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Although I have often read in the bathroom, I never thought to read such an interesting and, dare I say it, entertaining book about defecation and waste removal and treatment.

All humor aside (and I guess its taboo is why one feels compelled to try to be humorous about this subject), this is actually a very serious subject. The author tells us how the creation of sewage systems, and flush toilets, has probably led to a hugh improvement in life expectancy, since fecal related illness was, and remains in most of the world, the biggest killer (especially of little children, the elderly, and the immuno-compromised).

It is astounding to learn that most people don't even have outhouses, but must just squat where they can. The desease ramifications of this simple fact are enormous, and not humorous at all. Suddenly, the reader runs into some very sobering facts.

On a personal level, I don't think I'll ever put grease down the sink again, after reading about those (literally) walls of grease in the sewers. Her walk through a sewer amazed me and, for the first time, I realized that the people that do this work routinely are a bit heroic, putting life and limb at risk for our public health. I do recall that when I lived in Louisville, KY years ago, the sewers exploded when a factory emptied some chemical down the drain. This is very dangerous.

I recommend this book absolutely.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book should be a best-seller, December 25, 2008

By	JKJ (Midwestern USA) - See all my reviews

As for the organization of this book, I'd give it 3 stars. But the subject matter is so important that this should be a best-seller, on every thinking person's reading list.

The book begins with some historic background on sewers, and how sewers and the flush toilet drastically improved public health. I would have enjoyed more of this. There's an overly-long section on high-tech Japanese toilets and why they haven't become popular elsewhere. I would have preferred less of this. I don't want a high-tech toilet, but would be interested in learning more about the composting toilets being used in some places in the Far East and Europe.

The real focus of this book, it seems to me, is the LACK of toilets and sewers in so much of the world. It's horrifying how many people still defecate outdoors, mostly because their governments have ignored sanitation, and the effects this has on public health. Billions of people have few options, little knowledge, and no money with which to change the situation.

Like other reviewers, I would have appreciated more details about different types of toilets, latrines and the like, how efficient they are (or aren't), etc.

The interviews with various activists, especially in India and China, who are working to improve things, are interesting. Despite their tireless efforts, it doesn't sound as if the battle for sanitation is being won. Huge slums everywhere are growing faster than the problems can be addressed.

Anyone who has read "Angela's Ashes," and remembers the descriptions of the neighborhood toilets the McCourts used in Ireland, will recognize this.

As for those of us in the Western world, it's appalling that so many of our cities still pollute the oceans with our sewage. In other words, this isn't a third world problem, it's a WHOLE WORLD problem. Equally appalling is that supposedly "clean" sewage by-products, heavily contaminated by chemicals, are being used as crop fertilizers in the U.S. and England. Sickening -- literally and figuratively!