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"There's Money in Thirst," reads a headline in the New York Times. The CEO of Nestlé, purveyor of bottled water, heartily agrees. It is important to give water a market value, he says in a promotional video, so "we're all aware that it has a price." But for those who have no access to clean water, a fifth of the world's population, the price is thirst. This is the frightening landscape that Karen Piper conducts us through in The Price of Thirst--one where thirst is political, drought is a business opportunity, and more and more of our most necessary natural resource is controlled by multinational corporations.

In visits to the hot spots of water scarcity and the hotshots in water finance, Piper shows us what happens when global businesses with mafia-like powers buy up the water supply and turn off the taps of people who cannot pay: border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, a "revolution of the thirsty" in Egypt, street fights in Greece, an apartheid of water rights in South Africa. The Price of Thirst takes us to Chile, the first nation to privatize 100 percent of its water supplies, creating a crushing monopoly instead of a thriving free market in water; to New Delhi, where the sacred waters of the Ganges are being diverted to a private water treatment plant, fomenting unrest; and to Iraq, where the U.S.-mandated privatization of water resources destroyed by our military is further destabilizing the volatile region. And in our own backyard, where these same corporations are quietly buying up water supplies, Piper reveals how "water banking" is drying up California farms in favor of urban sprawl and private towns.

The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists, The Price of Thirst paints a harrowing picture of a world out of balance, with the distance between the haves and have-nots of water inexorably widening and the coming crisis moving ever closer.

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Library Journal Review

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink." This poetic line could become a global chant if water inequality continues, as Piper (postcolonial studies, Univ. of Missouri; Cartographic Fictions; Left in the Dust) explains in her latest work. The author presents an alarming account of the state of water on a global scale by traveling to six continents and a dozen countries to investigate what happens to vast populations when water is treated as a commodity, not a human right. Countries such as Chile and South Africa, as well as the city of New Delhi, have become battlegrounds for water rights after privatization has left impoverished communities with either dry taps or flooded villages. Piper further explores how historical colonization has encouraged water to be treated as an economic commodity on indigenous lands. She studies the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and G-20 policies in relation to water inequality for a fifth of the world's population and concludes that communities should focus on giving power back to the people, not to corporations. VERDICT Essential for the reader interested in global poverty and human rights and those who enjoyed Thomas Nazario's Living on a Dollar a Day.-Angela Forret, Clive P.L., IA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This study by Piper (geography, Univ. of Missouri) begins with historical context, institutional background, and a paradigm critical of for-profit corporations in the water sector. The author argues that water privatization projects, institutions, and initiatives in California, Chile, South Africa, India, Egypt, and Iraq lead to disenfranchisement of poor people, increased tariffs for water, and enhanced profits for corporate water providers. The author visited water projects and conducted interviews to acquire firsthand knowledge of water institutions and community protests. The factual narratives from those interviews are combined with complementary bibliographic sources. Those facts and sources, plus the author's theoretical underpinnings, lead to a troubling reality: water supply corporations, World Bank-sponsored water projects, and states captured by for-profit water devotees contribute to tragic underdevelopment, lead to serious ecological damage, favor the upper tiers of society, and fail to provide safe drinking water for the poor. The concluding chapter reviews critical lessons and discusses alternatives to the commodification of water. While recommending public and community control of water resources, the author should have included case studies in which public control enhanced inequality and failed environmentally. It would also be useful to explore how those realities might be corrected by reforming water institutions and legal foundations. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. --Barney F. Hope, California State University, Chico

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Karen Piper is the author of Cartographic Fictions and Left in the Dust, which the Los Angeles Times has called an "eco-thriller" that every "tap-turning American" should read. A regular contributor to Places magazine, Piper is also a winner of Sierra's Nature Writing Award and has published in numerous academic journals. Currently, she is professor of postcolonial studies in English and adjunct professor in geography at the University of Missouri.