The Dirt On Clean

Author : Katherine Ashenburg
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 030736836X
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dirt on Clean written by Katherine Ashenburg and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-05-21 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Katherine Ashenburg
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1466867760
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dirt on Clean written by Katherine Ashenburg and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Olli Lagerspetz
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780239580
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Philosophy of Dirt written by Olli Lagerspetz and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is dirt, and what does it really mean to be dirty or clean? Dirt and cleaning are often associated with ideas of guilt, otherness, and social control, but also with living responsibly and in harmony with the environment. In this learned, innovative study, Olli Lagerspetz offers a persuasive discussion of dirt and its ramifications across philosophy and culture. Writing with wit and grit, he argues that questions of dirt and soiling can neither be reduced to hygiene nor to ritual pollution. Instead, they are integral to almost every human activity. As participants in material culture, we not only produce things and dispose of them, but we also engage with them practically, aesthetically, and morally. Everything, in essence, comes back to dirt and waste. Ranging through subjects and times, from Heraclitus of Ephesus to the Renaissance (via Heidegger and Mary Douglas), from the hygienic products of modernity to abject art, Lagerspetz constantly questions current thinking on all subjects most foul. Proposing a new view of dirt based on our physical engagement with the world, A Philosophy of Dirt is essential reading for all students of philosophy and for anyone who’s felt soiled—and wants to know why.

Author : Jessie Sholl
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 9781439192535
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dirty Secret written by Jessie Sholl and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-12-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at compulsive hoarding by a woman whose mother suffers from the disease. To be the child of a compulsive hoarder is to live in a permanent state of unease. Because if my mother is one of those crazy junk-house people, then what does that make me? When her divorced mother was diagnosed with cancer, New York City writer Jessie Sholl returned to her hometown of Minneapolis to help her prepare for her upcoming surgery and get her affairs in order. While a daunting task for any adult dealing with an aging parent, it’s compounded for Sholl by one lifelong, complex, and confounding truth: her mother is a compulsive hoarder. Dirty Secret is a daughter’s powerful memoir of confronting her mother’s disorder, of searching for the normalcy that was never hers as a child, and, finally, cleaning out the clutter of her mother’s home in the hopes of salvaging the true heart of their relationship—before it’s too late. Growing up, young Jessie knew her mother wasn’t like other mothers: chronically disorganized, she might forgo picking Jessie up from kindergarten to spend the afternoon thrift store shopping. Now, tracing the downward spiral in her mother’s hoarding behavior to the death of a long-time boyfriend, she bravely wades into a pathological sea of stuff: broken appliances, moldy cowboy boots, twenty identical pairs of graying bargain-bin sneakers, abandoned arts and crafts, newspapers, magazines, a dresser drawer crammed with discarded eyeglasses, shovelfuls of junk mail . . . the things that become a hoarder’s “treasures.” With candor, wit, and not a drop of sentimentality, Jessie Sholl explores the many personal and psychological ramifications of hoarding while telling an unforgettable mother-daughter tale.

Author : Suellen Hoy
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195354850
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chasing Dirt written by Suellen Hoy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-10-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans in the early 19th century were, as one foreign traveller bluntly put it, "filthy, bordering on the beastly"--perfectly at home in dirty, bug-infested, malodorous surroundings. Many a home swarmed with flies, barnyard animals, dust, and dirt; clothes were seldom washed; men hardly ever shaved or bathed. Yet gradually all this changed, and today, Americans are known worldwide for their obsession with cleanliness--for their sophisticated plumbing, daily bathing, shiny hair and teeth, and spotless clothes. In Chasing Dirt, Suellen Hoy provides a colorful history of this remarkable transformation from "dreadfully dirty" to "cleaner than clean," ranging from the pre-Civil War era to the 1950s, when American's obsession with cleanliness reached its peak. Hoy offers here a fascinating narrative, filled with vivid portraits of the men and especially the women who helped America come clean. She examines the work of early promoters of cleanliness, such as Catharine Beecher and Sylvester Graham; and describes how the Civil War marked a turning point in our attitudes toward cleanliness, discussing the work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and revealing how the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War inspired American women--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and Louisa May Alcott--to volunteer as nurses during the war. We also read of the postwar efforts of George E. Waring, Jr., a sanitary engineer who constructed sewer systems around the nation and who, as head of New York City's street-cleaning department, transformed the city from the nation's dirtiest to the nation's cleanest in three years. Hoy details the efforts to convince African-Americans and immigrants of the importance of cleanliness, examining the efforts of Booker T. Washington (who preached the "gospel of the toothbrush"), Jane Addams at Hull House, and Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement House. Indeed, we see how cleanliness gradually shifted from a way to prevent disease to a way to assimilate, to become American. And as the book enters the modern era, we learn how advertising for soaps, mouth washes, toothpastes, and deodorants in mass-circulation magazines showed working men and women how to cleanse themselves and become part of the increasingly sweatless, odorless, and successful middle class. Shower for success! By illuminating the historical roots of America's shift from "dreadfully dirty" to "squeaky clean," Chasing Dirt adds a new dimension to our understanding of our national culture. And along the way, it provides colorful and often amusing social history as well as insight into what makes Americans the way we are today.

Author : Katherine Ashenburg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781554517909
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book All the Dirt written by Katherine Ashenburg and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents information about personal cleanliness in different historical periods and cultures from around the world, examining the widely varying conceptions of what cleanliness has meant in different times and places.--

Author : Peter Ward
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0228000629
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Clean Body written by Peter Ward and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How often did our ancestors bathe? How often did they wash their clothes and change them? What did they understand cleanliness to be? Why have our hygienic habits changed so dramatically over time? In short, how have we come to be so clean? The Clean Body explores one of the most fundamental and pervasive cultural changes in Western history since the seventeenth century: the personal hygiene revolution. In the age of Louis XIV bathing was rare and hygiene was mainly a matter of wearing clean underclothes. By the late twentieth century frequent – often daily – bathing had become the norm and wearing freshly laundered clothing the general practice. Cleanliness, once simply a requirement for good health, became an essential element of beauty. Beneath this transformation lay a sea change in understandings, motives, ideologies, technologies, and practices, all of which shaped popular habits over time. Peter Ward explains that what began as an urban bourgeois phenomenon in the later eighteenth century became a universal condition by the end of the twentieth, touching young and old, rich and poor, city dwellers and country residents alike. Based on a wealth of sources in English, French, German, and Italian, The Clean Body surveys the great hygienic transformation that took place across Europe and North America over the course of four centuries.

Author : Virginia Smith
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191579939
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clean written by Virginia Smith and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-07-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we still have nits? What exactly are 'purity rules'? And why have baths scarcely changed in 200 years? The long history of personal hygiene and purity is a fascinating subject that reveals how closely we are linked to our deeper past. In this pioneering book, Virginia Smith covers the global history of human body-care from the Neolithic to the present, using first-hand accounts and sources. From pre-historic grooming rituals to New Age medicine, from ascetics to cosmetics, Smith looks at how different cultures have interpreted and striven for personal cleanliness and shows how, throughout history, this striving for purity has brought great social benefits as well as great tragedies. It is probably safe to say that no-one who reads this book will look at his or her body (or bathroom) in quite the same way again.

Author : Karen Logan
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0671535951
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clean House Clean Planet written by Karen Logan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This easy-to-use guide for everyone who is concerned about the toxic chemicals in cleaning products includes remarkably simple recipes for natural, non-toxic household cleaners that really work--the secrets the cleaning industry doesn't want consumers to know.

Author : Paulette Bourgeois
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780949449672
Total Pages : 48 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dirt on Dirt written by Paulette Bourgeois and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Earth, mud, grime, soil, whatever you call it - dirt is everywhere. The Dirt on Dirt gives you the many wonders of dirt - where it comes from, how to make the best dirt, and where to dig for buried treasure. Dig in! Muck around in the dirt!