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42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oh what shall we do with all our poo?, July 7, 2006
This review is from: Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization (Hardcover)
Most people just don't understand
the wonder of the flush
Now here comes Hodding with his book
To get you off your tush
The Romans they used aqueducts
The French called "Garde L'eau"
London stank before they learned
to use the water flow
Where now exists a porcelain bowl
With custom seat and lever
Once plagued the mighty London town
with cholera and fever
All the people in the world
Make tons of poop each day
We never bother where it goes
Once we flush it away
We need to find efficient ways
To utilize our waste
A topic that we all ignore
And treat with much distaste
So all hail the humble plumber-guy
No joking `bout the crack
Without his help the stuff you flush
may soon be coming back
A simple, concise, funny book
the writing's off the wall
The perfect gift for homeowners
for reading in the stall
Amanda Richards, July 7, 2006
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Art and Mystery of plumbing, June 29, 2006
This review is from: Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization (Hardcover)
Carter, a "great sanitation scholar," gives us an outstanding tour of the world of plumbing; several tours, actually. One is the historical tour, from classical times to the present day and beyond. Carter goes back to the Romans, whose pipes made of lead ("plumbum" in Latin) gave us the word for plumber. The trip through time make brief stops in the dark ages, where monks railed against pagan rituals of water and washing, while quietly enjoying the highest levels of sanitation around. Carter's next historical high points come in the 18th and especially 19th century, when Europe finally recovered and surpassed the Romans' level of engineering sophistication. The story continues into today, with recent innovations like the 1.6 gallon flush, and into some truly exciting possibilities for the future of human waste processing.
Another kind of tour lets us visit the technologies of waste removal. Up until the 1800s, that largely consisted of an open window, a shouted warning to anyone passing below, and a mighty heave of the "thunder mug," which left the streets in a condition that beggars modern imagination. From there, Carter works up to the high-tech digesters that biologically decontaminate Boston's sewage stream, and to practical demonstrations of recovering energy from methane given off, or even bacterial fuels cells that generate electricity directly.
It's also a story of social progress. People live longer and fewer children die of disease spread by fecal contamination, to be sure. Carter also describes low-tech innovations in India that promise to improve the lives of the untouchable undercaste, once they are freed from the necessary but "unclean" duty of clearing away the human waste of India's hundreds of millions.
Not least, it's a story of Carter's own adventures and misadventures with the maze of pipes behind his own walls. That's part of what makes this book so enjoyable: the enthusiastic and highly personal tone of his writing. It's a summary of his wide-ranging studies in what we do with the poo, but always light and readable. I fault his research for only one small point, his neglect of the New World before the European arrival. The Aztecs built some of the world's most populous pre-technological cities and dealt with their excreta much more effectively than European cities of the same size and period. Still, it's an informative and enjoyable look at what we'd usually rather not look at.
//wiredweird, reviewing a complimentary copy
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Musings on the Daily Constitutional, July 10, 2006
This review is from: Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization (Hardcover)
So many things we take for granted, not just the little matters that avoid our brain cells for lack of interest, but even the major aspects of the basics of living. W. Hodding Carter has provided at least one repair job for that lack of understanding of how things work and an appreciation for the history of a major system in our homes in his fascinatingly rich little book of facts and perusings on water - as it comes into our homes, as we consume it, use it as an accompaniment to our food intake, wash our laundry, and as we literally flush it out of our domains. This wonderful little book FLUSHED: HOW THE PLUMBER SAVED CIVILIZATION may carry a title that borders on grandiose convictions, but it most assuredly is a resource of just how our plumbing system works and, more interesting, how it came to be in the first place!
Carter embraces water and waste with the passion of a zealot and that tone makes reading his book all the more delightful. He takes us back to the formative thoughts of how the earth ('a whirling molten sphere spinning around the sun, releasing superheated gases into space, something like an orbiting overgrown Walter the Farting Dog'), while cooling, turned those gases into vapor, condensed them and created water. From the earliest civilizations he explains how man's need for water to live resulted in the gradual development of bringing water into the dwelling and eventually (very eventually) getting the water, now accompanied by waste, back out of the dwelling. And here begins a history lesson that travels through the Greeks and Romans, the Indians, the Japanese etc discovering along the way the ingenuity of aqueducts, lead/clay/wood/cement/brick/PVC piping all the way to the current state of the art Japanese Toto Washlet S300 which not only serves as an exit for yesterday's meals but adds the luxury of cleaning the owner simultaneously!
Carter's writing style varies with each chapter: when he is discussing his personal involvement with learning the art of plumbing he is comfortably conversational, and when he is delving into the intricacies of history his descriptive manner changes appropriately to thesis style. But at no point does he lose the reader's attention. He is bright, if a bit of a 'true believer', humorous, warmly concerned about some bigger issues about which he hints, and in the 'end' has written a book that educates, illuminates, teaches and entertains. Who could ask for more? Recommended for all curious readers. Grady Harp, July 06
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