Katherine Ashenburg. (2014). The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Katherine Ashenburg. 2014. The Dirt On Clean: An Unsanitized History. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt On Clean: An Unsanitized History. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Katherine Ashenburg. The Dirt On Clean: An Unsanitized History. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

OverDrive Product Record

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Dirt on Clean An Unsanitized History

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1. • value: showering
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16. • value: health habits
17. • value: indoor plumbing
18. • value: Roman Bath
19. • value: bath houses
20. • value: bathhouses
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22. • value: bathing habits
23. • value: medical disinfection
24. • value: history books with pictures
25. • value: history of personal hygiene
26. • value: illustrated nonfiction books
27. • value: surgical disinfecting
28. • value: cultural history of sanitation
29. • value: ritual purity laws

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Ashenburg, Katherine
   • bioText: Katherine Ashenburg is a journalist, lecturer, and regular contributor to The New York Times. Her books include The Mourner's Dance and The Dirt on Clean.
   • name: Katherine Ashenburg

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2014-04-08T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Dirt on Clean

fullDescription

A spirited chronicle of the West's ambivalent relationship with dirt
The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did Napoleon know something we didn't when he wrote Josephine "I will return in five days. Stop washing"? And why is the German term Warmduscher—a man who washes in warm or hot water—invariably a slight against his masculinity? Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as these in Dirt on Clean, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time.
What could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? And yet cleanliness, or the lack of it, is intimately connected to ideas as large as spirituality and sexuality, and historical events that include plagues, the Civil War, and the discovery of germs. An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, Dirt on Clean considers the bizarre prescriptions of history's doctors, the hygienic peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet oversanitized.

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1. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
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     "Dozens of charming illustrations distinguish a book notable for its engaging design as well as its illuminating content."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly

   • content: "Brimming with lively anecdotes, this well-researched, smartly paced and endearing history of Western cleanliness holds a welcome mirror up to our intimate selves, revealing deep-seated desires and fears spanning 2000-plus years."
3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 3, 2007
     According to Ashenburg (The Mourner's Dance
     ), the Western notion of cleanliness is a complex cultural creation that is constantly evolving, from Homer's well-washed Odysseus, who bathes before and after each of his colorful journeys, to Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, who screams in terror during her first hot bath. The ancient Romans considered cleanliness a social virtue, and Jews practiced ritual purity laws involving immersion in water. Abandoning Jewish practice, early Christians viewed bathing as a form of hedonism; they embraced saints like Godric, who, to mortify the flesh, walked from England to Jerusalem without washing or changing his clothes. Yet the Crusaders imported communal Turkish baths to medieval Europe. From the 14th to 18th centuries, kings and peasants shunned water because they thought it spread bubonic plague, and Louis XIV cleaned up by donning a fresh linen shirt. Americans, writes Ashenburg, were as filthy as their European cousins before the Civil War, but the Union's success in controlling disease through hygiene convinced its citizens that cleanliness was progressive and patriotic. Brimming with lively anecdotes, this well-researched, smartly paced and endearing history of Western cleanliness holds a welcome mirror up to our intimate selves, revealing deep-seated desires and fears spanning 2000-plus years. 82 b&w illus.

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A spirited chronicle of the West's ambivalent relationship with dirt
The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did Napoleon know something we didn't when he wrote Josephine "I will return in five days. Stop washing"? And why is the German term Warmduscher—a man who washes in warm or hot water—invariably a slight against his masculinity? Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as these in Dirt on Clean, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time.
What could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? And yet cleanliness,...

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