What I gleaned from the comments is that it's a wonder anyone survived through the time and we need to be oh-so-thankful for government laws and regulations which have themselves provided us with clean, air, water and food. And garbage pick up.
No, actually it is a treatise on the miracle of modern life, modern technology and how literally sh*tty life used to be. People were truly dirty. Smelly. Refrigeration was non existent and sanitary food was impossible unless you killed it or harvested it yourself.
And as we all should know, government regs and laws have appeared in order to curtail the freedom that modern technology has made possible because that's what government does.
The book is great at telling in excruciating detail how great life had become in the mid to late twentieth century and how stupid it was to pine away for a return to "simpler" times. Today's environmentalists, if they could be transported back in time a century or two, would be shocked at how horrid life was when horses were the primary mode of transportation. Or how miserable things were before modern sewer systems, water delivery and purification systems came along. And yet, they romanticize those times as idyllic.
The book illustrates just how bad things used to be and helps to underscore how we take damn near everything about modern life for granted because most of those living today have known nothing else. I personally have never known life without modern plumbing but both of my parents grew up in (rural) households with outhouses.
