Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret

In her memoir, "The Story of More," Catherine Coleman Flowers reveals the systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that create Third World conditions in America, from Alabama to Alaska and on Native American reservations. She argues that sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 12 May 2022
Publisher: The New Press

A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020, Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur "genius," was born in Lowndes County, Alabama, a region known as "Bloody Lowndes" due to its violent and racist past. Once the center of the voting rights struggle, it is now Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers's life's work - a fight to ensure human dignity through a right that most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing of the waste from their toilets, and as a result, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America's dirty secret. In this "powerful and moving book" (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West.

In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards - not only those of poor minorities.

Weight: 276g
Dimension: 139 x 217 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781620977132