Book reviews Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York the Last Two Hundred Years Miller, B. Four Walls Eight Windows, 39 West 14th Street, Room 503, New York, New York 10011, www.4W8W. com. ISBN: 1–56858–172–6. $18.00. 420 pages. 2000. As the subtitle indicates, this book describes the history of solid waste management over the past 200 years in one of the world’s largest metropolises. It is a well-researched analysis and presentation of the circumstances that have led New York City to its present solid waste management system. In this very densely populated city, solid waste is a controversial political issue that never goes away. The book reads much like a detective story, with plenty of intrigue, as the cast of characters, circumstances, and outcomes unfold. With regard to basic community ser- vices, the often confounding effects of politics, social customs, the need for improved environmental condi- tions, and human motivations are clearly apparent as the author marches through history, commencing in the early 1830s. For background, the author parallels the history of New York waste with that of London and Paris. For instance, he describes life in a Paris’ waste disposal site known as Mountfaucon in the 1830s. The captivating interest of this book resides in the power of personalities and the seemingly unrelated circumstances that shaped the development of several of New York City’s community services, e.g. transportation and waste management. The book contains 13 chapters, organized into four parts: Engineering Reform, Expanding Opportunities, Public Works, and Landscape Sculpture. The major events and turning points that are described in the book are also presented at the beginning of the book, in the Chronology section. The Chronology serves as a handy reference, as the timeline of the story unfolds. In the final chapter of the book, the author, a former New York Department of Sanitation Director of Policy Planning, provides his own insights into the precarious status of solid waste management in New York City. The author calls his selected topic an analogy to muni- cipal corruption and inefficiency, past and present. Given the recent events in New York, the book would be of interest to a wide audience. For instance, the author describes Mayor Giuliani’s decision to close the Fresh Kills disposal site without a well thought out alternative as ‘‘disastrous’’. Mr. Miller is to be con- gratulated on the magnitude of the undertaking and on the depth of research and synthesis necessary to recon- struct two centuries of history as it applies to solid waste management. If anyone would like to know and under- stand the circumstances and events that shape solid waste management decisions in large cities, this book is a must read. Unlike several other books dealing with solid waste management, this reviewer could hardly set the book down due to the anticipation of the next set of events. Benjamin Miller was the Director of Planning for the New York City Department of Sanitation and has served as a policy advisor on the environment to several organizations. G.M. Savage CalRecovery Inc 1850 Gateway Boulevard Suite 1060 Concord, CA 94520, USA E-mail address: 6savage@calrecovery.com PII: S0956-053X(02)00034-X Waste Management 22 (2002) 837–839 www.elsevier.com/locate/wasman Waste Composting for Urban and Peri-urban Agri- culture: Closing the Rural-Urban Nutrient Cycle in Sub- Saharan Africa Ed. P. Drechsel and D. Kunze, CABI Publishing, Wall- ingford, UK, 2001, 256 pp. ISBN 0 85199 548 9, Hard- back, £45. This book has a significant input from many authors in a variety of different countries in Europe, Asia and Africa, and this diversity is reflected in the wide-ranging discussion relating to the central theme of composting and urban/peri-urban agriculture. It considers the impor- tant topic of rapidly expanding urban populations, their difference from rural populations and the associated planning pressures of this urban growth, for example, problems with dealing with waste generation in increas- ingly industrialised areas within developing countries and the importance of environmental protection. The mainstay of the book is to consider the management of the organic fraction of that waste, which is often the major