An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, The 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. Katherine Ashenburg is the prize-winning author of three non-fiction books and hundreds of articles on subjects that range from travel to mourning customs to architecture. 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 The Dirt on Clean, her charming tour of attitudes toward hygiene through time. Did Napoleon know something we didn't when he wrote to Josephine, ``I will return in five days.
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. As advertising exploded in the early 20th century, so did our obsession with personal hygiene. 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. 'Advertising and toilet soap grew up together,' says Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean.
The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. Her childrens edition of The Dirt on Clean, called All the Dirt: A History of Getting Clean (Annick Press, US and Canada Sunest Publishing, Korea), won the.
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