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by: Elizabeth Royte  List Price: $24.99 Amazon.com's Price: $16.49 You Save: $8.50 (34%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 338.4766361 EAN: 9781596913714 Edition: 1st U.S. Ed ISBN: 1596913711 Label: Bloomsbury USA Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 256 Publication Date: May 13, 2008 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Release Date: May 13, 2008 Studio: Bloomsbury USA Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: An incisive, intrepid, and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialization of our most basic human need: drinking water. Having already surpassed milk and beer, and second now only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we’re hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we’re drinking and why. In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles? A riveting chronicle of one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century as well as a powerful environmental wake-up call, Bottlemania is essential reading for anyone who shells out two dollars to quench their daily thirst. Average Rating:
 Rating: - Important Reading that Raises Important QuestionsI found this book to be highly informative, putting a human face on a series of complex issues without simple answers. The book itself draws uncertain conclusions and leaves ultimate decisions in the hands of individual consumers and the masses, both localized and globalized. I found myself armed with new factual information with which to present my own arguments and with which to make my own personal decisions, including many surprising tidbits that were truly eye-openers. Despite a lengthy bibliography, ... Read More Rating:  - Anti Business PolemicAlthough many reviewers have commented on the author as an environmentalist, she is really opposed to corporations developing and marketing something as basic to nature as water. She finds this essentially offensive, as if a large corporation might automate the raising of organic bean sprouts and deliver them to grocery stores. It takes the environmental revolutionary and the Vermont coop out of the equation. If everyone drinking sugar-laden sodas were to switch to bottled water, as many have, the health ... Read More Rating:  - Excellent research and writing on this priority subjectBottlemania: how water went on sale and why we bought it By Elizabeth Royte (Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York - First edition 2008) What is our future if water, life's most vital necessity, becomes a commodity - to be sold for profit - rather than a shared commons? In this fast-moving, well-researched book, Elizabeth Royte describes the astonishing increase in sales of bottled water in the U.S.; this, despite the fact that tap water costs anywhere from 240 to 10,000 times ... Read More Rating:  - Long on strident advocacy: short on provable factsI was pre-disposed to liking this book based upon its full title alone: "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It". Indeed, I look at people with their fancy, expensive bottled waters and chuckle. Tap water in most US cities is good enough for me. So I sat down with "Bottlemania", enitrely prepared to enjoy a roasting of the bottled water industry and (in my opinion) the foolish people who buy most of its wares. I quickly realized that "Bottlemania" was long on strident advocacy ... Read More Rating: - My impressions of BottlemaniaAnyone reading this book will hopefully pick up their plastic water bottles and heave them into the recycling bin. This is an excellent piece identifying both sides of the contentious issue of the right to water and who should use it. This book is worth reading for anyone in the developed world. 
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