WASTE

Imagine that your septic system fails after you lost your job because of Covid-19 or another disaster. Your yard turns into a sewer, and you don’t have thousands of dollars for a new tank. Flowers shows that if your state enforces laws that criminalize the failure to maintain a legal septic tank, you could also get arrested. She sees such tragedies frequently among the mostly poor, Black residents of Lowndes County, where “an estimated 90 percent of households have failing or inadequate wastewater systems.” In an imperfect blend of memoir and reporting, the author recalls her years of work to ease conditions so unsanitary a U.N. official said he hadn’t seen them “in the first world.” With admirable tenacity, Flowers cultivated reporters; got help from Jane Fonda; took Cory Booker to visit a man whose backyard “held a pit full of waste piped straight from his toilet”; and persuaded Baylor doctors to conduct a study of the region, which found that 34.5% of tested residents had hookworm, a disease of poor sanitation that many people thought the U.S. had eradicated. Similarly dire sewage problems, she shows, exist in places from Appalachia to the San Joaquin Valley. In a largely chronological narrative, Flowers tends to present facts in the order in which she learned them—not when readers most need to know them—and slows the pace with overlong digressions into her earlier years and unedifying passages on topics such as “turning lemons into lemonade” and the effect of Jonathan Livingston Seagull on her life. The urgent message of the book, however, transcends its writing lapses, and it should raise much-needed awareness of a public health catastrophe.

A useful primer on why America’s treatment of raw sewage doesn’t pass the smell test.