Waste, Catherine Coleman Flowers
Waste, Catherine Coleman Flowers
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Waste
One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret

Author: Catherine Coleman Flowers

Narrator: Karen Chilton

Unabridged: 6 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 11/17/2020


Synopsis

Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights
struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowers’s life’s work. It’s a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many
people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth.

Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this powerful book 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.

Flowers’s book is the 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. It shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards, and not only those of poor minorities.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Danna

I was disappointed in Waste. The initial chapter grabbed me: I couldn't wait to learn more about what Catherine Coleman Flowers describes as America's dirty secret--that there are thousands of citizens living without adequate septic systems. It was an eye-opener for me and I'm sure will be for many......more

Goodreads review by Brooke

This is hard for me to rate, as the topic is incredibly important, the author impressively credentialed and inspiring, and the message needs to be shouted from the podiums of every auditorium in the U.S. Flowers opens the reader's eyes to the horrific instances of untreated waste in rural parts of o......more

Goodreads review by Tina

This is an eye opening book on how the intersection of poverty and racism result in terrible living conditions in Alabama. This book is fascinating on multiple levels. First the details of the issue itself. I had no idea that septic systems failed depending on soil type, or that people were arrested......more