Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing - Tapa dura

Ashenburg, Katherine

3,71

2.438 calificaciones proporcionadas por Goodreads

9781846680953: Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

Tapa dura

ISBN 10: 1846680956 ISBN 13: 9781846680953

Editorial: Profile Books, 2008

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Unusual book

"Sinopsis" puede pertenecer a otra edici�n de este libro.

Cr�ticas:

...terrific history of personal hygiene...a wonderfully interesting and amusing book. (Daily Mail)

(A) very enjoyable read. (Catholic Herald 2008-07-11)

This is perhaps the final irony in this splendid exercise in cultural relativism: that we can be too clean. (The Tablet)

...highly entertaining, nicely illustrated history of washing. (The List)

Ashenburg is a lively and entertaining guide... this is a sparkling, discursive and witty history: good, clean fun. (Cressida Connolly New Statesman)

Ashenburg...rounds off with a splendid diatribe against American super-cleanliness, which, like every section of this book, is full of acute perceptions...The only possible complaint about Ashenburg's exceptionally enjoyable book is that, being beautifully designed and illustrated, it is not suitable for reading in the bath. (John Carey The Sunday Times)

In Clean Ashenburg rolls up her sleeves and takes us on an engaging tour pf hygiene through the ages. Her masterful mix of erudition and anecdote makes this a fascinating, fast-paced read...More than just a witty insight into washing, her book confronts our obsession with preening, plucking and perfuming our bodies so that we smell less like humans and more like exotic fruits...Thought-provoking, charming and great fodder for dinner-party chat, this is a memorable read. (Time Out)

A lively history of personal hygiene shows that cleanliness hasn't always been next to godliness... In Clean, Katherine Ashenburg tells the weird, zigzagging story of our most intimate rituals through lively, heavily-illustrated chronological chapters... Ashenburg is especially good on the differences to be found in hygiene around the world...If dire predictions about future water shortages turn out to be correct, Ashenburg's book will one day serve as the key text in defence of a dirtier way of life. (Isabel Berwick FT magazine)

Ashenburg's account of our changing attitudes to cleanliness is fascinating. (Waterstone’s Quarterly)

As this enthralling journey through the bathrooms of history reveals, attitudes to cleanliness have ebbed and flowed...Where Clean succeeds brilliantly is in the liberal use of fascinating facts, quotes and anecdotes. Ashenburg has clearly had fun writing this book. You'll enjoy reading it. (BBC Focus)

Rese�a del editor:

Napoleon once wrote in a love letter to Josephine 'I return to Paris in five days. Stop washing.' To smell like a human was not always the misdemeanour it is today. Body odour was in fact an important factor of sex and courtship, considered by some to be a powerful aphrodisiac, as we see in Napoleon's letter. Contrary to what we like to think, no bodily odour is innately disgusting, instead it is our noses which adapt to fit our beliefs.

The Romans would bathe in company and daily. Later, Europe underwent four centuries without a bath. Was it the threat of diseases like syphilis that it feared in the soapy water? Religion links the act of washing with forgiveness and regeneration. We wash the bodies of dead loved ones because somehow we imagine it as the end of the old and the beginning of the new. The history of washing our bodies reveals much about our intimate selves, about how we want to be seen and what we desire most...

In this gripping new history, Ashenburg searches for clean and dirty in plague-ridden streets, hospitals, battlefields and makeshift water closets. In the bizarre prescriptions of history's doctors, the eccentricities of famous bathers and the hygienic peccadilloes of great writers we see the twists and turns that have brought us to our own, arbitrary notion of 'clean'.

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