The Big Necessity

The Big Necessity (Rose George, 2008) is, to put it bluntly, a book about shit and how humans deal with it. (For the most part George refers to it as excreta, but says that shit is actually a better word for its blunt matter-of-factness.) At the beginning of the book she includes chapters on toilets and sewers of the developed world, including Japan's luxury toilets and the challenges of designing low-flow toilets in North America, but her real focus is on the struggles faced by the 2 billion people worldwide who still lack even the basic sanitation of a good latrine.