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.
So far, the Americans and English have resisted the charms of a toilet that can "check your blood pressure, play you music, wash and dry your bottom by means of an in-toilet nozzle, put the seat lid down for you, and flush away your excreta without requiring anything as old-fashioned as a tank."
Unfortunately, there are few toilets available in India, Africa, South Africa, Malaysia or Bangladesh.
It is in these countries that George discovers the omnipresent and dangerous results of limited or nonexistent access to sanitation.
Although the Chinese have long used human waste -- night soil -- as fertilizer, other nations often let their waste lie in the open, contaminating water and food.
This is especially true in India, where "nearly 800 million Indians" resist pressure to change historic habits of open defecation in fields, at roadsides and beside train tracks. Sanitation is a hard sell in that nation, as millions of government-built latrines have been turned into firewood stores or goat sheds.
From his headquarters in Mumbai, Dr. Bandeshwar Pathak has struggled for decades to persuade Indians to abandon centuries of tradition. Endowed with a "messianic" fervor, he has designed a new toilet called Easy Latrine. Despite its relatively inexpensive cost, however, the technology has found few converts.
Pathak has built the world's first known toilet museum and invented the one-cup water flush toilet, but he admits that changing habits is difficult.
