Tries to shock rather than inform

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.

NOT about scatological humor

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 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.

Delightful seriocomic glimpse into a misunderstood world

Once I got past the unusual odor upon opening this book I couldn't put it down. The kind of book you want to put into the lavoratory for your guests to read when using the facilities The preforated tear out pages remind the old timers what Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogs were once used for.