Each year, Case Western University chooses a book for its “Common Reading” program; all first-year students have to read it. This year, it’s Bottlemania, an environmentalist case against bottled water.

From Case Western:

In Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, this year’s selection for the Common Reading Program, environmental journalist Elizabeth Royte explores the staggering popularity of bottled water, the multi-billion-dollar industry that supports it and the building backlash against it.
In the book, one of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 “Must Read” nonfiction titles of 2008, Royte travels to Fryeburg, Maine, home of Poland Spring water. In this small town and other like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon, even as it threatens local control of natural resources and dumps tons of plastic waste into the country’s landfills.
Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today and the social impact of corporations sinking ever more pumps into rural towns.
Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains.

The assignment is part of this year’s theme at the school, “Year of Water.”