Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization

W. Hodding Carter

Hodding Carter emailed me a few months before this book came out and asked if I'd review it. I was playing the odds in thinking that this would be an extremely small press release, perhaps even a vanity, and that I'd have a very difficult time tracking a copy of the book down. But the premise of the thing intrigued me, and I was quite happy to find out I was wrong, and that Atria were releasing it. So I put a copy on hold at the library, and found myself seventeenth in line for it; either Carter had emailed a whole lot of people, or I somehow missed rather a good bit of buzz on this work that, as its subtitle attests, is all about plumbing. Now, you wouldn't think that plumbing would be a very popular subject for a book. My experience is that you would be wrong. Seventeenth in line in my library system is a place I usually find myself in for the latest Lemony Snicket novel, not a book about plumbing. So I waited. And I waited. And it finally came in for me. And the big question has to be whether the book was worth the wait? And the answer is that it most certainly was; it's one of a growing number of compulsively readable nonfiction books that's crossed my path in the last year, and this is a trend that I am quite happy to see.

While Carter spends a good deal of time discussing plumbing, and does it in a surprisingly readable fashion, what really sets the book apart is Carter's own attempts, often at great personal cost, to attempt to do some of the things that plumbers have done over the years. While it's not polite to laugh at someone else's misfortune, this is good old-fashioned slapstick on more than one occasion. And, like the man said, it's not a party till someone loses an eye, right?

Quite enjoyable, and recommended.