Sorry so long....I hope to get this FIRST book! :-D
The Dirt on Clean
An Unsanitized History
Written by Katherine Ashenburg
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Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 978-0-676-97663-2 (0-676-97663-8)
Pub Date: October 12, 2007
Price: $35.00
Buy from Local Store or Online Store.
About this Book
For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a public two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, a scraping of the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the seventeenth-century aristocratic Frenchman, it meant changing his shirt once a day, using perfume to obliterate both his own aroma and everyone else’s, but never immersing himself in – horrors! – water. By the early 1900s, an extraordinary idea took hold in North America – that frequent bathing, perhaps even a daily bath, was advisable. Not since the Roman Empire had people been so clean, and standards became even more extreme as the millennium approached. Now we live in a deodorized world where germophobes shake hands with their elbows and where sales of hand sanitizers, wipes and sprays are skyrocketing.
The apparently routine task of taking up soap and water (or not) is Katherine Ashenburg’s starting point for a unique exploration of Western culture, which yields surprising insights into our notions of privacy, health, individuality, religion and sexuality.
Ashenburg searches for clean and dirty in plague-ridden streets, medieval steam baths, castles and tenements, and in bathrooms of every description. She reveals the bizarre rescriptions of history’s doctors as well as the hygienic peccadilloes of kings, mistresses, monks and ordinary citizens, and guides us through the twists and turns to our own understanding of clean, which is no more rational than the rest. Filled with amusing anecdotes and quotations from the great bathers of history, The Dirt on Clean takes us on a journey that is by turns intriguing, humorous, startling and not always for the squeamish. Ashenburg’s tour of history’s baths and bathrooms reveals much about our changing and most intimate selves – what we desire, what we ignore, what we fear, and a significant part of who we are.
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Extras
- The world’s earliest known bathtub, from around 1700 B.C., was found in the Queen’s apartments at the Palace of Knossos on Crete, and is made of painted terra cotta.
- People rarely used soap to wash their bodies until the late 19th century. It was usually made from animal fats and ashes and was too harsh for bodies; the gentler alternative, made with olive oil, was too expensive for most people.
- The Roman imperial baths were so gigantic that a single chamber — the hot room of the Baths of Caracalla — housed 20th-century productions of Aida that included chariots, horses and camels, as well as the cast and audience.
- In Finland, where the sauna is a national institution, when government leaders cannot agree on an issue, they adjourn to the sauna to continue the discussion.
- Medieval Christians proved their holiness by not washing. A monk came upon a hermit in the desert and rejoiced that he “smelt the good odour of that brother from a mile away.”
- Because so much sex went on in the public baths of the middle ages, the term “stew” or “stewhouse,” which originally referred to the moist warmth of the bathhouse, gradually came to mean a house of prostitution.
- 16th century French deodorant: “To cure the goat-like stench of armpits, it is useful to press and rub the skin with a compound of roses.”
- When the Master of a Cambridge college was urged to provide baths for the students in the early 19th century, he responded that there was no need, since “these young men are with us only for eight weeks at a time.”
- In 1931, halitosis was cited as grounds for divorce.
- The accumulated sweat, dirt and oil that a famous athlete or gladiator scraped off himself was sold to their fans in small vials. Roman women reportedly used it as a face cream.
THIS ONE TOO:
Rick Mercer Report: The Book
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Written by Rick MercerRick Mercer Author Alert
Category: Humor; Humor - Political
Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 978-0-385-66518-6 (0-385-66518-0)
Pub Date: September 25, 2007
Price: $29.95
Buy from Local Store or Online Store.
About this Book
Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, prepare yourself for the next big thing in publishing – Rick Mercer Report: The Book.
After a decade-long absence from our book stores, Canada’s preeminent satirist returns with a new collection of rants, writings, and comic encounters with the great and good of politics, showbiz, and literature. (Yes, relive Pierre Berton offering advice on rolling a joint, and Margaret Atwood showing off her hockey skills as a goalie.) Rick, a tremendous writing talent as well as a verbal one, has selected the best of his rants from the first four seasons of RMR, sprinkled in choice moments from his interviews, added a generous helping of other material that has never been broadcast, and arranged the whole into revealing themes and groupings with all-new introductions, reflections, and updates. Who knew that Stephen Harper was quite so preoccupied with gay sex? That Paul Martin could be so forgetful? That politicians could be so sleazy? Well, no doubt most of us did — but it’s wonderful to have it pointed out again by this brilliantly funny and charismatic talent.
