A "review" of The Big Thirst

This is the story of a guy who takes his reading list very seriously.

A few weeks ago I got my grubby little mitts on a copy of The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water by Charles Fishman. It's a non-fiction novel about water waste and management, and how several people in various situations have helped to change how we think about such a precious, non-renewable resource.

It is the worst book I have ever read not written by Thomas Hardy.

Simply enough, I wanted very much to enjoy this book. I care about the topic of water conservation. The disappointing delivery of this book left me cold. I have a tenet to which I always try to adhere: "Don't put a book down before you get to page 100." It has helped me on a couple of occasions over the decades when I've read some really great novels that had trouble getting their bearings or that could not start out in a compelling way. Books that present themselves non-chronologically, for example, sometimes need to be given the opportunity to make their case. I wouldn't like Margaret Wander Bonanno as much as I do if I'd put down the first book of hers I'd read before page 100. As I recall, it was murderous until about page 77, and then I had to buckle my seatbelt because man, it turned into a really satisfying ride.

But I digress.

This started out simply with me complaining on the Internet. I posted to Twitter: "Ever take interest in a book only to have the author completely fail at doing his job? http://sgp.cm/eb76d5" Shortly thereafter, Charles Fishman replied to me: "@xenotrope huh. in what ways, xenotrope, did i completely fail to do my job as an author? @cfishman, cnfish@mindspring.com".

Nice! I like it when an author tells me "Come at me, bro." I sent him the following e-mail. If there are any typographical errors contained within, please let me know:

Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:12:17 -0800
Subject: On The Big Thirst
To: cnfish@mindspring.com

Hi Charles,

I first heard about your book "The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water", from your interview on The Daily Show. The subject of water conservation has always been an important topic to me, and it's not often than a guest on Jon Stewart's program can make him look even paler and more peaked than he usually does. The topic of the book is obviously significant, informative, and foreboding. In short, I was pumped.

I eventually picked up a copy and excitedly started reading. Honestly, I struggled through the first 100 pages. The subject matter is really compelling but I'm disappointed in the delivery of the information. The narrative flow is choppy. The focus jumps around from an IBM water processing plant to Galveston, then later back to IBM. Ideas are never explored fully, presented, then dismissed in a natural segue to move onto the next logical topic. They just sort of weakly bob up and down, listlessly waiting for you to bring them up again later.

An author's responsibility, particularly with a subject like science writing that can be hard to approach from a layman's perspective, is to make his subject interesting, motivating, even captivating. A capable author will deliver education as well as entertainment. He fails if either of these is missing in his finished work. This requires a finesse of writing to make the material more digestible. The gold standard of this kind of conceptual translation is Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Bryson's book is a concise explanation of science, the history behind how our society has learned what we know, and the consequences of overconsumption of natural resources. My mistake was believing that "The Big Thirst" would be a similar work.

The end result is that the novel is filled with numbers and numerical tangents that break the flow of the storytelling, barely better than spreadsheets and tables. Flipping to a page at random (page 68 of the hardcover edition) I find this passage: "...turf emitters, spraying wide areas of grass, run at 30 gallons per minute; the drip irrigation heads run at about 1 gallon an hour. Replacing seventy-six acres of grass with rocks, gravel, and desert plants, says Rohret, he hoped to save 80 million gallons of water a year. 'Last year, we were down 120 million gallons, way more than I dreamed.' That takes $280,000 off Angel Park's water bill (Angel Park pays $2.33 per thousand gallons of recycled water)." It goes on, on page 68 alone, mentioning "$3 a gallon" of this, "120,000 pounds of grass seed a year, down from 160,000 pounds", "$45,000 an acre", and so on. Am I reading a business proposal? An agricultural academic paper? An SEC filing? It sure seems like it. Where is the substance? I am completely emotionally unattached to these facts and figures. The thread that ties these absolute values together and gives an impactful insight is totally absent.

In case you're feeling that I'm asking for oversimplification, I'm not. In another section you state that a town in Pennsylvania was under a boiling restriction for 273 days. You also state that this is long enough to conceive a child and bring it to term. I'm no doctor, but I know how long 273 days is. The analogy to childbearing is superfluous at best, patronizing at worst. Similar analogies appear everywhere. A twenty-foot water pipe is wider than the cross-section of a Boeing 747. The supposition you make here is that I don't know how wide twenty feet is. If Earth were as big as a Honda Odyssey minivan, then such-and-such. If a circuit path were as wide as a sidewalk a water molecule would be the size of an M&M. The analogies are clearly trying to take complicated concepts and distill relative and relational understanding from them, but they just plod on and on and bog the entire thing down. The plot of the book, if one can in fact be found, is compelling on the occasion when you actually bring it forward and let it flourish. I had no idea that Las Vegas has undergone a water conservation renaissance and Patricia Mulroy is an amazing, albeit reluctant, hero for your story. Her experiences are amazing, but sure enough they're broken up with more asides and stilted comparisons until it's almost unrecognizable.

I'm on page 130 right now, right at the comparison of IBM's conceptualization of water management to Apple iTunes. I don't think I have the strength to try to keep barreling through this. Narrative jumps around. Tense changes from past to present and back. Parts of it are written like you're trying to emulate an action novel. Parts of it are written like it's your memoir. First person perspective pops in for a few pages, then vanishes. Who are the protagonists? It's clear to me from your writing style that you're very data-driven; a "show me the numbers" kind of guy who is intelligent enough to derive your own conclusions from the raw facts of a situation. I understand and appreciate that you respect your readers enough to believe that they, too, can derive their own opinions from a sea of figures and chopped up vignettes of first- and third-person accounts of water utility woes. Sadly, I don't turn to my non-fiction pile to be inundated with a torrent of numbers and waves upon waves of superfluous analogies. The message that you were intending to deliver is lost. Puns intended: the underlying story is dry and the delivery is all washed up. So in summary, I feel that this book fails to deliver its message, promote awareness of water usage and conservation, or motivate me to rethink what goes on whenever I turn on the faucet. I'm sorry, I really tried to like this book. The subject matter means a lot to me. I just can't force myself to finish it, and the text itself isn't making me care.

Toby

There's more that I wanted to say in this mail, but I'd have to get foul-mouthed, which I don't think is entirely appropriate when you're trying to give feedback to an author who is already defensive but still willing to hear your criticism. Credit must go to Fishman for being brave enough to ask me, a stranger online, to give him a piece of my mind.

As my mom says, "Shit or get off the pot." If you're going to tell a story, tell it. If you're going to present facts, present them. "A, then B, then C." You can dress it up, but don't lose sight of your goal, whether it be to convey information, to entertain, or both. It is maddening to have someone fumble through telling a story in a choppy and aimless manner: "C. Oh, but A, I should mention A, too. And C again. Don't forget C just because I'm talking about A now. I'll get to B, but first I need you to know that A comes before C. OK, now B. B comes after A. But B also comes before C...." Argh. When you're preaching to the choir and someone in the choir stands up and leaves because of you, there is something wrong with the way you preach.

Fishman wrote me back. Typographical errors are left intact with [sic]:

Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:38:27 -0500 (GMT-05:00)
From: Charles Fishman <cnfish@mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: On The Big Thirst

I'm sorry. You clearly do not like the way I write.

That's too bad, but also fine. I can't bear William Faulkner. Just can't get into him. That doesn't make me a bad reader; it certainly doesn't make Faulkner a bad writer.

But I have many smart, astute readers who looks [sic] at my work well in advance — and I'm not going to change how I write dramatically at this point, any more than I'm going to change how I walk. Alas.

My only response to you would be that I actually did do all the things you ask — just not in a way you connect with. I've done years of deep research; and I've tried to present that in a way that connects with people. You find the analogy — the pipe to the 747, the length of the boil water order to pregnancy — insulting and patronizing. I've gotten many notes from people who say precisely the opposite. I can't imagine what a 20' wide pipe is like — but comparing it to an airplane fuselage makes it vivid for me.

That is, I don't believe I abdicated my responsbilities [sic] as an author. The book isn't inaccurate, it isn't superficial, it is not in fact randomly organized — it has an organization that is well-thought-out. You just don't see it or like. [sic] In all, I've told a story told [sic] in a way you find completely off-putting. If you read the Amazon reviews, and the journalism reviews, there are people who clearly feel differently.

That's just a difference in taste. I will say that the numbers passage from Las Vegas, that you picked out, is definitely an example of too much. I will take that criticism to heart. Too many numbers is simply impossible to absorb — you're right.

If you'll send me your address, I'll be happy to send you back whatever you spent on the book (I appreciate that's not the point, of course). I'm sorry the book doesn't capture you — in fact, aggravates you.

Please don't torture yourself any more. There's nothing worse than plowing through something that is aggravating you. And the thought of you reading my sentences, which are ticking you off in every paragraph, truly makes me wince. So I hope you'll stop — with joy and relief.

Thanks for taking the time to write, and to read what you did. (One small correction: That was NOT me in The Daily Show — the was a guy named Alex Prud'homme, author of a book called "The Ripple Effect," also about the current state of water, also out this year. My manner is nothing like his. His book aside, I thought he was actually quite snippy and rude to Jon Stewart, which is pretty uncalled for.)

Best to you.

Charles Fishman
cnfish@mindspring.com

My bad, Fishman is right. The interview I saw on The Daily Show was, in fact, Alex Prud'homme. In retrospect I must have gotten the name of this book from someplace I find reputable and it escapes me now. I didn't just search for "book about water", I specifically sought out The Big Thirst. No matter. I was not familiar with either author until today and I don't want anyone thinking I'm mad because I mistook a cookbook written by someone unfortunately named "Steven King" as a scary novel by the master of horror "Stephen King". I am judging this book on its own merit, not the faults of my believing it to have been something else. Fishman concedes that my given excerpt of his, being nothing but a rambling of numbers and comma-delimited thought fragments, is "too much". He neglects to admit that the entire book is written in this way. I don't take issue with page 68. I used page 68 as an example of the larger problem. I responded:

Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:58:11 -0800
Subject: Re: On The Big Thirst
To: Charles Fishman <cnfish@mindspring.com>

Hi Charles,

With the heartfelt joy felt only by myself and children who have learned that school is ending early today, I have moved my bookmark into Samuel Shem's "The House of God". No refund necessary. Have a nice day.

Toby

Then I wrote this whole thing up into an Amazon.com review that's currently pending approval. I have never been so happy to put a book down in all my life. I'm positively giddy.

On a side note, William Faulkner was a literary prize-winning machine: he won a Nobel Prize and at least a couple of Pulitzers. This fact doesn't make him a good writer. He experimented heavily with narrative structure in As I Lay Dying, which is a work of fiction. He probably wouldn't give a damn if you got what he was trying to say or not because the journey is the worthier part. The Big Thirst, in contrast, is intended to be a popular non-fiction work about an allegedly important topic: water conservation. Readability and coherence suddenly become much more important, wouldn't you say?