Book review: The Big Necessity, by Rose George

My review of Rose George’s The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters appeared a couple of weeks ago in the New Haven Advocate & the Fairfield Weekly.  I will say that shit never gets old–it’s always interesting:

We are schizophrenic about shit. On the one hand, we laugh at it in grossout films and in elementary school. We revel in strange details, such as Martin Luther reportedly eating a spoonful of his own excrement each day for medicinal purposes. On the other hand, we tend to think of the bathroom as an intensely private space, so much so that many of us will flatly refuse to do anything that makes a noise while another person’s within earshot. Both perspectives imagine excretion as shameful or abnormal even though, as children’s book author Taro Gomi taught us long ago, everyone poops.

As ever, read the whole thing!