The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters | 
 enlarge | Author: Rose George
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 3409
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 0805082719
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.72
EAN: 9780805082715
ASIN: 0805082719
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
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Product Description
An utterly original exploration of the world of human waste that will surprise, outrage—and entertain Produced behind closed doors, disposed of discreetly, and hidden by euphemism, bodily waste is something common to all and as natural as breathing, yet we prefer not to talk about it. But we should—even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. For it’s not only in developing countries that human waste is a major public health threat: population growth is taxing even the most advanced sewage systems, and the disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, 1.95 million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable. The Big Necessity takes aim at the taboo, revealing everything that matters about how people do—and don’t—deal with their own waste. Moving from the deep underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York—an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen—to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, Rose George stops along the way to explore the potential saviors: China’s five million biogas digesters, which produce energy from waste; the heroes of third world sanitation movements; the inventor of the humble Car Loo; and the U.S. Army’s personal lasers used by soldiers to zap their feces in the field. With razor-sharp wit and crusading urgency, mixing levity with gravity, Rose George has turned the subject we like to avoid into a cause with the most serious of consequences.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 This was a unique book November 25, 2008
I congratulate the author for creating a book for wide readership acceptance that is based on a subject that is normally relegated to the engineering or medical sub-specialty categories of media. In fact, just getting a book on this subject into the "New Release" or "Hot New Title" section of the major booksellers is an achievement that I admire.
I enjoyed 3 specific chapters of the book: the behind-the-scenes look at waste sewage treatment in London & New York, the review of the toilet bowl industry and how internationally the design and features of toilet models is beyond anything that Americans would perceive as existing, and finally the controversy regarding the usage of biosolids and its viability in the United States.
Unfortunately, I felt that too much of the book was focused on the problems of sanitation and toilet hygiene in under-developed locations of the world, specifically in Asia, India, and some parts of Europe. Clearly this is where the issue of fecal-matter contamination of worker and 2.6 billion people not having access to toilet facilities is most relevant- fortunately in the USA we do not have as wide array of problems with water contamination and toilet access. I personally did not find the international aspect of the issue to be interesting, but then again I usually read books that only focus on issues or persons within the USA. (I don't read the International section of the newspaper or look for books talking about the World Cup, for example. Nothing to demean the issues, but for me it doesn't relate to me).
I reccommend this book to those who enjoy reading about challenging International health, human welfare, and engineering issues, as well as those who may be curious as to the future of toilet fixtures in the USA. For those looking for a book that describes fecal matter in funny words and is a funny book to put next to the toilet and make your house guests blush.... look in the humor section.
 A brave topic so poorly executed November 24, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I will give Rose George a lot of credit for raising up an often under discussed topic and casting light on it. Still the book does a very poor job out of deciding what the issue is. After reading it, you can't tell if we are faced with a problem that is a result of societal norms, corruption, poor education, poverty or a combination of all of the above. Also, she wanders all through the topic and at times seems more interested in an engineering expose versus an indictment of failed policies and then a history of how people have gone to the bathroom.
I really think this book had the potential to be hard hitting and eye opening. Sadly, its lack of focus makes it very difficult to absorb.
 An Overview of Sanitation in the World November 20, 2008
The main theme of this book is the human waste management problem and how it is related to human health. The author has covered this topic from many angles: sewage systems, toilets (from very high-tech ones to the most primitive to none at all), human waste-related habits and diseases, waste treatment, various sanitation efforts, psychological matters, sociological issues, etc. She has traveled to many countries and talked to a great many people from higher-level politicians to the poorest of the poor. The writing style is clear, friendly, accessible and always very frank - the author is not shy about using the right words at the right time. The book's slant is more towards sociological/political matters rather than the scientific/technical details and processes which are discussed more superficially. In fact, in my view, there should have been more of the latter, e.g., elemental composition of sewage, the physics and chemistry of the sewage treatment processes, etc. Nevertheless, this is a very interesting book that is sure to inform most readers. It can be enjoyed by anyone, especially the sociologically-inclined.
 A stunner! Recalls Lappe's _Food First_ November 15, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
A stunner and a mind opener. To me, the world is now a different place than it was when I started to read this book. It is comparable to Frances Moore Lappe's _Food First._
"2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse, or a rickety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, though not a safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways.... Four in ten people live in situations where they are surrounded by human excrement because it is in the bushes outside the village or in the city yards, left by children outside the backdoor."
As an aside, I am also left awed at the sheer amount of travel Rose George had to have done to write that book.
Open Discussion of a Forbidden Topic November 14, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
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