History of Shit

Rating:
Summary: NOT about scatological humor
Review: Although it is hilarious in parts, it is actually a pretty sober piece of scholarship, albeit written in the dank hull of that "ship" rather than on the impeccably clean and respectable captain's deck, as it were. The spirit with which this book is written, makes it a sort of lesser cousin to Louis Aragon's Treatise on Style.

The content basically traces the (political and economic) history of the problem of getting rid of human excrement and other bodily productions, including, ultimately, foul language and obnoxious thought -- as defined by the State and Royal Science. Arguing for the paralell between the history of subjectivity and the history of 'merde' in all its multifarious forms, Laporte centers his thesis on the (Freudian) idea that the rise of the subject and subjectivity is intimately tied to the decline of the olfactory sense (the public organ par excellence) and its replacement by the optical (the organ of privation). Laporte explores the subsequent tensions that came to define modernity's agenda in the space between the private nose and the public eye.

Discussed here, in a style of writing that is so erratic and meandering (at high speeds) that it comes close to derailing altogether, are Egyptian rites and Roman laws, furniture design, urban planning, and medieval edicts concerning burials (so as to minimize the spread of "morbidific rays" emitted by the decomposing dead).
Body, bed, building, tomb, and tomes are all examined in their association with the ever-present tyranny/blessing of the cloacal, the miasmic and the mephitic. The problem of properly disposing human 'merde' has consequences far beyond the water closet and beyond the little container (the cranium) that contains that most most fertile producer of foul ideas -- the brain. An excellent peek by way of Poopology to another take on the History of Control.

Warning: As the content of this book is not bathroom humor, the illiterate or the poorly educated cannot reasonably expect to get any pleasure out of this small but pungent book. Avoid this unless you are familiar with European intellectual history.

Rating:
Summary: not what the doctor ordered, alas
Review: Good heavens! What an awful title for a book. Hearing it for the first time, I dropped my monacle. Hearing the title for the second time made me do it again. I really should stop being so horrified.

Rating:
Summary: good heavens!
Review: Good heavens! What an awful title for a book. Hearing it for the first time, I dropped my monacle. Hearing the title for the second time made me do it again. I really should stop being so horrified.

Rating:
Summary: not what the doctor ordered, alas
Review: Interesting, thought-provoking, sometimes even funny, but in the end, you're better off buying Kevin Kim's "Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms," which deals with the subject more humorously and less (ahem) maturely.

Rating:
Summary: Tries to shock rather than inform
Review: This book is an academic romp through taboos, especially those that can in some way be related to excretion. Laporte begins by reviewing a 1539 French royal edict that railed against the use of Latin in official documents. He then juxtaposes this with a second edict of the same year that expressed disgust at the unhygienic conditions of the Paris streets and responded by demanding that residents clean up their practices and house owners build cesspools. He gropes to find a connection between the two edicts, and proceeds in a similar fashion throughout the book, striving to connect theories of philosophy, economics, and linguistics with a few episodes in the history of public hygiene in France. Throughout the book, Laporte takes great enjoyment from wallowing in academic obfustication of his material. In the introduction, the translators note that they strived hard to faithfully convey the impenetrability of the text. They greatly succeeded. With words such as physiocrats, antiphrasis, and mephitic, you'll need a dictionary to get through this one.

The book is illustrated with black and white photographs and drawings that appear at the end of each chapter. To see where the illustrations fit, you must pay close attention to the margins of the text, where the figures are cited by number. The connection between the illustrations and the topic of the corresponding part of the text is, in many case, not very clear. Sources are cited using endnotes appearing at the end of the book. There is no index.

A few ideas presented in the book got me thinking a little, such as, the quotation from a letter by Paul Leroux, "By nature's law every man is at once a producer and consumer, and if he consumes, he produces." Most of the others left me scratching my head, such as "Language comes into its own only through an act of castration that marks it as feminine." Readers with a thorough classical background in philosophy, semantics, and economic theory who find humor in the scatological may enjoy this book immensely. But if you're actually looking for some historical material about sanitation and public hygiene, you would be better to look elsewhere.


Rating:
Summary: Delightful seriocomic glimpse into a misunderstood world
Review: this is a good book and i recommend it.