Toilets of the World

You can learn a lot about a country and about people by seeing what kind of toilet (or lack there of.) that they use. The pictures in this book are great and the topic is light hearted and interesting to read. This book covers amazingly strange toilets with animal shapes or unusual thing like that - right down to the toilets of the poorest of the poor. You learn a bit of history and a bit about different cultures too.

A sort-of-silly book, this is at the same time interesting and a great read to have in your guest bathroom!

I am a self-confessed toiletbagger. I enjoy travelling to new places and checking out the facilities. This book piqued my interest and I awaited the arrival at my home. I was not disappointed. Appropriately placed in the "reading room" I enjoyed leafing through the pages and encountering some familiar scenes. There are some interesting tidbits about international personalities, common cultural treatments of one of the few unifying aspects of human existence and outright amazing feats of plumbing wizardry. I have a trip to London planned and will be taking the addresses of several facilities along in hopes of experiencing them firsthand.

Ok. toilets equate to "yuk", but I have always enjoyed them. First, friend of the modern era, we have them! Some are good, some not so good, some are bad (clogged and filled to the brim). But we have them, and they get a bad rap even though they do us a good thing, mostly. My copy of this book is placed just for fun; I put it on an easily broken chain (if anyone really wants it) in my guest bedgroom's bath. Inside the book I personally annotated certain toilets around the world that I visited personally (really), including one at the top of Peru (outhouse, basically), and some Asian toilets I remember (2 yrs. in Thailand). I loved every place I lived, not because of the toilets, but I remember them well. So, the irony, I dreaded using some of them at the time, but how fondly I look at the pictures now. What does that mean? My, my. In short, this book is a book about toilets. Good pictures, primitive history, and rather fun if you are sitting on a toilet and don't have anything else to do while you wait to finish. It's too sparse, and only for fun. Other books tell much more about sewage and piping, and getting water to your house, and waste away from it, an interesting history of just two centuries.. Toilets, that is all this book tells; don't expect more. It's fun.

When I think of entertaining reading material, I rarely think of toilets. "Toilets of the World," however, is an amusing homage to the endeavor of excretion. Divided by continents, this book examines the most unusual of all toilets from the world over, from the fantastically complex (I would not want to, for instance, use the toilet on a submarine lest I inadvertently configure the valves incorrectly and release "a high-pressure explosion of sewage throughout the submarine at a force of 225 pounds per square inch") to mere holes in the dirt. Part and parcel of this book explains not only the physical structure of these toilets, but also the local customs of different cultures. The lack of toilet paper use in Turkey and India (the left hand substitutes...) is a key example of cultural toilet use differences beyond the obvious squat versus sit elimination methods. There are many unusual toilets in this book, but for my money, the toilets of Asia take the cake, especially the urinals in the Lemina Building in Tokyo, which electronically sense when a man approaches, then burst into music and move the urinal vigorously hoping the man can accurately track the target, all the while taunting him with disparaging remarks and engaging in flash photography. There is an equally frightening experience awaiting the women in the same building which results in a bad case of claustrophobia, and features not only a giant mechanical geisha kissing the unsuspecting victim on the knees, but also a light show, fake thunder, and a hideous androgynous mechanical freak appearing from a secret compartment with the toilet paper. I guess it beats a hole in the ground. Five stars for making peristalsis an interesting cultural journey, a feat I had hardly imagined possible.

This book was purchased as a humorous gift for a family member, but I am seriously considering purchasing another copy for myself and displaying it prominently on my bookshelf. It is fascinating to me to see how other cultures differ from ours in this most basic function. The photos are great as well. I've never thought of toilets as artistic before, but this book may have changed my opinion.

I bought this as a gift and it was loved!!

I bought this for a family member who wanted coffee table books as a bit of a joke. He doesn't keep it on the coffee table (surprise surprise), but it makes for a very interesting read/view. Not only are there the illustrations, but useful descriptions. While you may not THINK this interests you (I think you will find it does), this is a great way to learn about how people do the necessary in places far from our own.

Well what a topic you didn't know would be so fascinating! Having travelled to many places and experienced various questionable, and confusing, toilets, this is a great book for me. Around the world in toilets ha. I actually saw this in a cafe toilet in Wales, loved in, stayed in there so long as I was looking at it (meaning my lunch companions had different ideas of what was happening in there), and bought it on Amazon there and then.

This book is very entertaining! it is unbelievable to think that toilets are a luxury for only few countries but it is also nice to find out about strange and colorful toilets you can visit while travelling...a new type of tourism!!!

Wohin der Kaiser zu Fuss geht - und zwar Kaiser aus aller Welt. Kaum zu glauben auf welche Ideen die Bauer und Baster der stillen Örtchen kommen. Von der improvisierten Holzhütte bis hin zum Hightech-Produkt. Es gibt nichts, was es nicht gibt. Habe das Buch selbst einmal geschenkt bekommen und war sofort begeistert. Sehr schöne Bilder. Nur WCs, keine Menschen. Und neben den guten Fotos auch noch gute Texte. Ich würde unbedingt die englische Fassung wählen. Vor allem auch wegen des Covers. Das gibt Gesprächsstoff und man greift gern zum Buch. Fazit: perfekte, niveauvolle Klolektüre, die einem sogar das Tor zu Welt öffnet. Unsere Gäste waren immer begeistert und die Verweildauer auf dem stillen Örtchen ist häufig deutlich länger als wirklich erforderlich...

ペーパーバック: 256ページ 出版社: Merrell (2009/09) ISBN-10: 1858944996 のレビュー 著者はふたりとも女性、世界中のトイレを巡り歩いた写真集である。ずいぶん評判がいいし、女性二人による実地体験なら面白そうだと買ってみた。結果は、可もなく不可もなし。 この種の本は、日本にはもっと面白いものがある。また、しっかりとした民俗学・人類学的な考察をした研究もある。そのあとで、これを手に取ると、あまりにも内容が薄い。奇抜は意匠のトイレルーム、景色のよい中にあるトイレなど、いくらでも見つかるわけで、そのいくつかを紹介されても物足りない。

Bought this for my fiancé who had been telling me toilet jokes and taking pictures of random toilets when he travelled. Great selection of different toilets with lots of photos and interesting facts. He has put it in his bathroom and loves it!