First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Straight Flush on the River

27 Comments

If ever there was a book that deserved to be the signature book of the WGOM, this baby would have to be it, because it is full of half-baked cr@p. Rose George's
The Big Necessity The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is, without a doubt, the best book I've ever read about poop.
But seriously, this is both an entertaining and important book. George moves deftly from the sewers of London to the slums of India; from high-tech bidets in Japan to "helicopter toilets" in Africa; from biogas digesters in rural China to the biosolids industry in the U.S.

Sh!t is big. An estimated forty percent of the world's population regularly or exclusively defecates in the open, without access to toilet or latrine. "One santitation expert," she writes, "has estimated that people who live in areas with inadequate sanitation ingest 10 grams of fecal matter every day."

"Diarrhea -- nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water -- kills a child every 15 seconds. ... Diarrhea, says ... UNICEF, is the largest hurdle a small child in a developing country has to overcome. ... Public health professionals talk about water-related diseases, but that is a euphemism for the truth. These are shit-related diseases."

The ultimate in bathroom reading, this book is not all gloom-and-doom. George is an accomplished reporter and story-teller. This book weaves together sketches of fascinating entrepreneurial characters fighting for social change and sanitation improvements, up-close-and-personal tours of sewer systems in London and New York, and accessible discussions of the problems of sewage sludge disposal in the U.S. I particularly enjoyed a section on the development of a new, more realistic "test medium" for toilets' flushing capabilities in the early 2000s. The secret ingredient -- miso paste.

I didn't expect [the inventor] to reveal the recipe of his giji obtusu ["fake body waste"], and in fact he's contractually forbidden from doing so. When he found the right brand, he asked to buy 250 kilograms from the importer. "His eyes lit up and he said, `How many restaurants do you own?' I said none and that actually he'd think it was funny but I wanted to use it to test toilets. He didn't think it was funny and suddenly he didn't want to sell it to me anymore."

Already, the book has had an impact on my family (both the Mrs. and The Girl read it before I did). I'm sure you'll be pleased to learn about the aerosol effects associated with flushing a toilet. We close the lid now....

What are you reading?

27 thoughts on “First Monday Book Day: Straight Flush on the River”

  1. Doc, if you're looking for a humorous volume of follow-up reading, I suggest Toilets of the World, a pretty well done (small) coffee table book about thunder buckets around the globe.

    I'm currently reading GB Tran's Vietnamerica: A Family's Leavetakings and Homecomings. The artwork is quite striking, the story less so, at least around halfway through.

    Bill Streever's Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places is an outstanding read. I have been taking it in at one chapter per month (each chapter begins in a different month), which has been something to look forward to the last couple months. I haven't yet gotten to the November chapter. Tthanks, grad school…

    Any of the s/f-oriented Citizens ever read Joe Haldeman's The Forever War I got it as a Kindle daily deal a while back but haven't cracked it yet.

    1. Most of The Forever War is pretty good. I don't know if you like the more physics-related sci-fi or not, but Haldeman does lean pretty heavily on time-dilation/relativity as a major part of his story line, which tends to make my eyes glaze over a bit. There are some amusing ideas on social values worked into it, too.

      2. The s/f I enjoy tends to be more focused on philosophy (political or otherwise) or with a noir flavor, which is how I think I wound up picking up The Forever War, figuring at $1.99 I wasn't out much if I didn't like it. I'll sit through the physics stuff if it's interesting or important, but I have a Humanities brain (as if that hadn't already become apparent many LTEs ago).

        1. plenty of philosophy in there, and a strong military grunt perspective component (he's a Vietnam vet). I don't recall the time-dilation (technical) discussion being particularly heavy. but then, I read it in h.s., so YMMV.

  2. I'm sure you'll be pleased to learn about the aerosol effects associated with flushing a toilet.

    After I learned in eighth grade that your sense of smell depends on inhaling solid particles, I try not to think about how all of that works too much.

    1. This is no big secret. There is a reason it is recommended that toothbrushes are stored in a different room from the toilet. I've taken to closing the lid prior to flushing, in any case.

  3. I've read a few books recommended here lately. The Turnaround, The Curious Incident..., Freedom, and American Gods.

    I'm about 2/3 into American Gods and it is my least favorite by far. I just can't get into it. I think I just don't like that type of book.

  4. still plugging through a song of ice and fire. about halfway through the 5th book now. it's pretty awesome, as has been noted in these hallowed halls before. i'm concerned about the afterward in the 4th book in which mr. martin said he hoped to have the next book out in a couple years tops. of course, the afterward was dated 2005.

  5. I finished American Gods about a week or so ago. As someone who is not really a fiction guy (heh, I guess my Spookymilk Survivor entries prove that point), I enjoyed it and was happy with the twists and turns. I'm finishing up a book about Dylan's Blood on the Tracks album and I have a few magazines that I've fallen behind on. After that I will be in need of a new tome or two.

    1. as usual, i'm a few months behind everyone else here. american gods is on hold at the library (i actually put a hold on the hold as i didn't realize i would be plowing through thousands of pages of ASOIAF), and i should be reading it shortly.

  6. I'm working my way through A People's History of the United States. Now that I'm taking the bus, I'm actually getting somewhere. It's an interesting counterpoint to what I remember from high school history.

    1. that one's on my shelf, waiting to be read. Zinn supposedly was pretty lefty in perspective (fwiw), but he had a fascinating personal history. Check out his Repository bio sometime.

      1. Already done. Calling him "leftist" is likely an understatement on his views. I thought he started the book by noting his bias, but it's actually in the Afterword, which I scanned while in the early part of the book.

      2. Zinn supposedly was pretty lefty in perspective

        Leader in the clubhouse for "Understatment LTE of the Year". But as sean points out, he's at least open about his biases, which is more than I can say about a lot of historians. Differing viewpoints/biases are fine and can bring a lot to the table, but it annoys the shit out of me when historians don't acknowledge their own blinders.

        If you want a sports angle from the same perspective, Dave Zirin wrote "The People's History of Sports in the United States". Zirin is a self-professed huge fan of Zinn's work. I saw him speak at the history conference in May, and he said reading Zinn's book formed most of his adult viewpoints. I won't discuss my opinions for fear of The Topic, but they (or at least Zinn, who was a proper historian with actual training, not some "commentator" who thinks far too highly of himself) should be given at least a cursory glance to have a better understanding of the different historical perspectives out there.

        1. Leader in the clubhouse for "Understatment LTE of the Year".

          Thank you, thank you. I'd like to thank all the little people who helped make this happen....

    3. I've read and re-read A People's History, it's the book that turned the tables on my pre-9th grade loathing of the school subject "history". Did anyone else's school call it "Social Studies"?

      1. Yes. Not until high school did I get "American History" or "World History". Everything before that was "Social Studies". Ahhh, the days when I could just read the book and kick ass on the tests.

  7. I know the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently put a bunch of money towards the development of composting toilets which could be used in Africa or elsewhere. I know modern toilets use less water than older toilets, but it would be cool if we didn't need any water to dispose of our solid waste.

    1. George addresses both of these issues pretty well. Getting something better in place in developed countries faces some pretty serious cultural barriers as well as technological/infrastructure barriers. Imagine re-plumbing millions of American homes to separate the toilet stream from everything else that goes down our drains.

      The book also hits pretty hard at what I'll call the Noblesse Oblige approach to development aid. She recounts numerous examples of latrine-building programs where the latrines end up not being used as latrines. For example, she cites one program that built many brick-and-concrete latrines that families now either live in our use as storage. When your latrine is better built than your house....

  8. I finished up a couple of books lately -

    The Postmortal, which I first mentioned back in September. You will probably know Drew Magary, if you know him at all, as Big Daddy Drew of Deadspin and KSK fame. The Postmortal is actually nothing like his online writing. The characters were believable and the consequences of cheating aging were reasonable and pretty well thought out.

    I also finished Incognito, which I mentioned in August. It's about how the brain works beneath our conscious decisions and just how much of the day-to-day living our brain takes care of automatically.

    I read Ken Jennings' Maphead in about 4 days. It was pure map-nerd nirvana. I feel like Ken and I are kindred spirits. I really enjoyed his book on trivia, Brainiac, was also a great read.

    I'm about 1/3rd of the way through The Hornet's Sting: The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum. Sneum was a Danish spy for the British in World War II. It was only $2 in the Kindle deal bin, and so far it's been definitely worth the investment.

    I purchased Infinite Jest with a gift certificate, but the progress bar on my Kindle shows me at about 7% of the way through, max, and it seems like I've been plugging away at it for awhile now.

  10. Birds in Fall, by Brad Kessler. Good read. Chronicle of Nova Scotian plane crash, and about the survivors, and a lot of ornithology about what happens to birds when they get blown out of their normal flight patterns... Metaphors aplenty. NBB rates this a 7.

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