Effluent America

With the publication of The Sanitary City (reviewed in Bull. Hist. Med., 2002, 76: 391-93), Martin Melosi established himself as this generation's leading synthesizer in urban environmental history. The result of more than ten years' effort, displaying a command of the secondary literature and an ability to assimilate masses of primary data, that monograph will stand with the work of Joel Tarr and a small number of others in the historiography of the sanitary infrastructure of American cities. Effluent America is a very different sort of book, more a celebration [End Page 464] than a manifestation of the author's accomplishments. It is a collection of revised, previously published writings, including empirical essays, policy studies, and commissioned chapters. Because some of these articles were written as overviews and therefore incorporate material that Melosi had earlier developed in others, the book tends to be repetitive; and because the articles had very different purposes at the time they were written, they do not hold together well in this volume

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