Where others are bold, Bottlemania is subversive, and after you read it you will sip warily from your water bottle (whether purchased or tap, plastic or not), asfreaked out by your own role in today's insidious water wars as by Royte's recommended ecologically responsible drink: 'Toilet to tap.'Įww. (Verdict: no and no.) Water is a topic that lends itself to tour-de-force treatment (the book Cadillac Desert and the movie Chinatown come to mind), as well as righteous indictments and dire predictions (Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water, When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century). from the grand specter of worldwide water wars, to the microscopic crustaceans called copepods, whose presence in New York's tap water inspired a debate by Talmudic scholars about whether the critters violated dietary laws, and whether filtering water on the Sabbath constituted work. All my preconceptions about this most basic of beverages have been queered.' And by the end of the book she will have discarded the old plastic bottle too, but not the tap.īottlemania is an easy-to-swallow survey of the subject from verdant springs in the Maine woods to tapwater treatment plants in Kansas City, Mo.

Partway through her reasonably balanced book, Royte, a lifelong fan of tap water, refills her old plastic water bottle, reflecting that 'what once seemed so simple and natural, a drink of water, is neither. The facile answer is marketing, marketing and more marketing, but Elizabeth Royte goes much deeper into the drink in Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, streaming trends cultural, economic, political and hydrological into an engaging investigation of an unexpectedly murky substance.

So why did Americans spend nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost? LITTLE ROCK - Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, by Elizabeth Royte, Bloomsbury, 248 pages, $24.99To paraphrase an old axiom: You don't buy water, you only rent it.

Bottlemania by elizabeth royte