'Light and easy-to-read narrative.lots of interesting factoids.' '-Providence Journal-Bulletin' after you read it you will sip warily from your water bottle (whether purchased or tap, plastic or not), as freaked out by your own role in today's insidious water wars as by Royte's recommended ecologically responsible drink: 'Toilet to tap.'' '-'Lisa Margonelli,' New York Times Book Review' '''Royte deserves credit for her tenacity and well-balanced approach.Lively investigative journalism.'-'Kirkus Reviews' Royte demonstrates how everything is, in the end, truly connected.''-Elizabeth Kolbert' ''Bottlemania 'is eye-opening and informative you will never look at water - either 'designer' or tap - in quite the same way.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Who owns our water? How much should we drink? Should we have to pay for it? Is tap safe water safe to drink? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What happens to all those plastic bottles we carry around as predictably as cell phones? And of course, what's better: tap water or bottled? Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. In this intelligent, accomplished work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Michael Pollan did for food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from distant aquifers to our supermarkets. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we're drinking. 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.

Second only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country.

Bottlemania by Elizabeth Royte