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Life of Pee
The Story of How Urine Got Everywhere
Sally Magnusson(Author)
Aurum (Publisher)
Published on 13. September 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
208 pages
978-0-7112-5584-5 (ISBN)
Description
Alchemists sought gold in it. David Bowie refrigerated it to ward off evil. In the trenches of Ypres soldiers used it as a gas mask, whereas modern-day terrorists add it to home-made explosives. All the Fullers, Tuckers and Walkers in the phonebook owe their names to it, and in 1969 four bags of it were left on the surface of the moon.
Bought and sold, traded and transported, even carried to work in jugs, urine has made bread rise, beer foam and given us gunpowder, stained glass, Robin Hood's tights and Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl Earring. And we do produce an awful lot of it. Humans alone make almost enough to replace the entire contents of Loch Lomond every year. Add the incalculable volume contributed by the rest of the animal kingdom and it might soon displace a small ocean. No wonder it gets everywhere. In Life of Pee Sally Magnusson unveils the secret history of civilisation's most unsavoury and unsung hero, and discovers how our urine footprint is just as indelible as our carbon one.
Bought and sold, traded and transported, even carried to work in jugs, urine has made bread rise, beer foam and given us gunpowder, stained glass, Robin Hood's tights and Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl Earring. And we do produce an awful lot of it. Humans alone make almost enough to replace the entire contents of Loch Lomond every year. Add the incalculable volume contributed by the rest of the animal kingdom and it might soon displace a small ocean. No wonder it gets everywhere. In Life of Pee Sally Magnusson unveils the secret history of civilisation's most unsavoury and unsung hero, and discovers how our urine footprint is just as indelible as our carbon one.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Quarto Publishing PLC
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-7112-5584-5 (9780711255845)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Person
Sally Magnusson is one of British broadcasting's most familiar faces and voices. An award-winning journalist and writer, she presents Songs of Praise, anchors the Scottish news programme Reporting Scotland and reports occasionally for Panorama. She also hosts Radio 4's Tracing Your Roots and Radio Scotland's Sally on Saturday.