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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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Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 4503
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
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 7 more reviews...
 Somewhat Interesting, Too Anecdotal October 19, 2008
Loyd E. Eskildson (Phoenix, AZ.)
18 out of 29 found this review helpful
"The Big Necessity" contains a fair amount of interesting information. Two billion, six-hundred million people lack sanitation (including 1.7 million in the U.S.) - lacking sanitation is defined as no outhouse, bucket, or box. The number of children killed by diarrhea exceeds that number killed in armed conflict since WWII, and 90% of that is caused by fecally contaminated food or water. Ninety percent of the world's human sewage ends up untreated in oceans, rivers, and lakes.
The average human produces 77 lbs. of excrement and 132 gallons of urine per year; add toilet flushes and the total reaches 4,000 gallons per year.
Restaurant-dumped fat solidifies and blocks sewers. N.Y.C. has 14 waste water treatment plants, vs. 3 in London. The American Society of Civil Engineers graded U.S. waste water infrastructure as D- in 2005. Rain can overwhelm sewer systems designed to include runoff water.
Japanese toilets are hi-tech - warmed seats, and washing and drying after used.
Pakistan spends 47X the amount on water/sanitation for defense, yet loses 120,000 to diarrhea each year.
About 90% of China's rural population's excrement is sprayed onto fields. Recently it has begun installing bio-gas digesters connected to their toilets, and about 40% ($170) of the cost is paid by government. Benefits include free cooking gas, 64% fewer flies, improved crop yields, and reduced toxicity of remaining sludge.
Sludge from American waste water plants is often used on crops; however, its acceptability is complicated by the presence of heavy metals and conflicting rules regarding their use. (Eg. Sewer workers should not be exposed to these toxins, but children near fields using the sludge are OK.) Some European nations now ban the use of sludge on fields.
The downside of "The Big Necessity" is that its anecdotal nature makes it difficult for readers to sometimes place facts into perspective, and some of the facts seem misstated.
 Open Discussion of a Forbidden Topic November 14, 2008
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
11 out of 12 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.
 A brave topic so poorly executed November 24, 2008
R. C Sheehy (Foxboro,MA USA)
6 out of 9 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.
A stunner! Recalls Lappe's _Food First_ November 15, 2008
Daniel P. Smith (Massachusetts, USA)
2 out of 4 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.
Turning the repugnant into a desire to help December 2, 2008
D. Maloney (California, USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Rose George strikes me as a strident young journalist; she applies her angry intelligence to the problem of human waste. Not many people want to think about this taboo topic because western culture pretends human waste does not exist.
Just half way through the book, I find myself moved to help the majority of humans who suffer daily from poor sanitation. The implications of poor toilets and lack of hygiene are alarming. So many people live hourly in misery due to this issue. I feel grateful for the not-in-the-least-bit simple pleasure of using a clean western flush toilet knowing that my sh&% will be taken elsewhere out of my consciousness. But I feel guilty at my ignorance in taking this for granted and for allowing the environment to be harmed by the lack of value placed on this resource.
This is a compelling read; I believe Rose's book will inspire aid organizations and reformers. While we do not need to mire ourselves in the darker aspects of life, it is about time that the simple bodily function of excretion got due attention. There is enough potty humour and fun sprinkled throughout this book to keep the squeamish reading.
I salute Rose George for her courage in publishing such an important book.
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