"In the name of research, Ms. George waded through sewers and checked out latrines all over the globe. On paper, she glides with rueful and articulate poise through the biology, ecology, physiology, psychology and basic hydraulics of her subject, always articulate and persuasive. Even if you are inclined to think health-care dollars should be put into titanium rather than porcelain, you will be hard pressed to put this extraordinary book down."—Abigail Zuger, M.D., The New York Times

"Rose George's The Big Necessity should become a classic in the limited literary annals of coprology. George, who is British, is an ebullient descendant of the virtuous Victorians, including Thomas Crapper, who brought us modern plumbing. With wit and style, she goes to sewage school, ventures into the sewers of London and New York, attends international toilet conferences and visits cities, villages, townships and slums in Africa, Europe, the United States, India, Japan and China. Along the way, she shines a spotlight on unknown but charismatic leaders in South Africa, heroic campaigners in India and industrious Chinese reformers who have converted 15.4 million rural households to biogas digesters: a cheap and inexhaustible supply of clean energy. She even reveals the wonders of Japanese 'washlets'—'a generic word for a high-function toilet'—especially the warm toilet seat manufactured by Toto. With $4.2 billion in sales in 2006, Toto has entranced the Japanese . . . The Big Necessity is a valuable and often entertaining, if somewhat dismal, account of the travails of human waste disposal."—Anna Sklar, Los Angeles Times

"Let's get the cover-blurb pander out of the way up front: If you buy just one book about human feces this year, make sure it's Rose George's The Big Necessity. Most people older than 9 prefer not to think much about the organic amalgam the American sanitation industry, in an excellent example of corporate euphemism, calls bio-solids. (Other, more poetic cultures prefer night soil; Rose George's English compatriots once called it 'gunge.' The author herself typically uses the sturdy old s-word. The Big Necessity is nothing if not frank.) Yet George's lucid, intrepid book of globe-spanning reportage not only sustains this apparently mundane subject for 304 pages, but it also leaves a reader both outraged and unexpectedly inspired. Night soil will never seem the same again. First, of course, George must overcome the natural reflex to laugh at her subject. The Big Necessity isn't exactly dour—prepare to discover the She-Pee female urinal and a latrine-emptying device called the Gulper—but, as George establishes, gunge is serious business. After all, certain prerequisites underlie civilized human life, and police, fire and espresso service all come after sanitation. Rome built its Cloaca Maxima in about 600 B.C.; without it there never would have been an empire. George lays out a shocking indictment of what we've accomplished since then . . . [George] makes an engaging and hardheaded guide, the kind of reporter who doesn't mind recounting her own urinary experiences in rural China. In the far-flung and unplumbed corners of a very septic world, she discovers a welter of solutions to the planet's s-word dilemma. She introduces Indian toilet entrepreneurs, South African cleanliness evangelists, Tanzania's Gulper inventors and China's impressive biogas digesters, handy devices that ferment human and animal waste into heating, cooking and lighting fuel. These efforts are as diverse as the places they serve, but the successful ones share a few common characteristics: They're low tech, decentralized, cheap and grassroots. The most promising, like biogas, transform a liability into an asset. (In contrast to these earthy undertakings, George's enthusiasm for Japan's scary computerized super-toilets is a bit unseemly. Just what we all need: another home appliance we can't fix. Long live the ballcock, that handy little mechanism that fills the water tank in your flush toilet.) The Big Necessity connects one of the oldest problems in human life (man's gotta eat, and man's gotta—well, you know) with a future likely to fall somewhere between the high-industrial grandeur underneath