“Miller’s main theme is the history of attempts to resolve the tension between veneration of water as pure, cleansing, and healthful, and fear of it as contaminated and dangerous. A second theme is how water, which has no smell or taste, became interesting. People in Western societies had to be told to consume this boring drink, thereby creating a market for more appealing beverages with added nutrients, carbonation, sugars, and flavours.”

Times Literary Supplement

“Miller’s volume on Water offers a different sort of history. He explores the role of an easily defined substance—‘a tasteless mixture of oxygen and hydrogen atoms that are chemically bonded together’—across the millennia, from the Incas and ancient Egyptians to the present day. . . . Miller devotes a chapter to water-lovers’ efforts to make an otherwise bland drink more interesting, from 18th-century German ‘butter water’, to the invention of carbonated water, to the mass marketization of lemonade. He also explores the commercialization of bottled water, and current concerns around the global struggle for access to clean, safe drinking water. Water may be humanity’s simplest edible product, but it’s also one fraught with some of the most complex politics in the present day.”
 

Hans Rollman | PopMatters