Reviews

This book was published nearly two decades ago (2007, I believe), making the last chapter, which focused on the then-modern era, significantly dated; I think it might be interesting to see a follow up analysis of how much has changed since the first release, especially that we've had a global pandemic in the meantime, which made the matters of hygiene particularly relevant.

Would I read that updated edition, though? Unlikely.

For a non-fiction book, The Dirt on Clean has a distinctly entertainment-adjacent tone that I don't usually expect from this genre. Don't get me wrong - I think that well-utilized anecdotes are an essential element of such books, otherwise they'd make for some extremely dry reading, but Ashenburg's writing reminded me (a bit too much) of magazines you might flip through when you don't have the brainpower to process anything too demanding. Which is surprising, seeing as Ashenburg shares her sources, and it looks like she had indeed researched the topic, at least on the surface.

Writing aside, I was rather disappointed that the scope of the author's research turned out to have been so limited: she talks extensively about hygiene-related habits in ancient Greece and later Rome, then analyses the situation in France and the UK (with some notable mentions of Germany), to end up adding the USA to the mix once it was, well, chronologically appropriate. Even with the assumption that the UK and France were, for a long time, trendsetters in Europe and much of the world, this is hardly a satisfying analysis of the situation on the continent, especially for a book that claims to focus on 'Western Europe' in general. (Eastern Europe, as usual, gets completely ignored, despite having no less extensive history.) Additionally, anecdotal sources and era-relevant fiction are heavily mixed with actual anthropological research. And, last but possibly not least, the formatting gave me a headache (although, admittedly, this may just be my edition): there are quotes and anecdotes on almost every page, no doubt meant to illustrate the point, except they don't always sync with what's being described in the nearest paragraphs and the way they are embedded in the main text forces you to stop reading, often mid-paragraph, just to switch to that little tidbit on the side. Very uncomfortable.

I wouldn't say this was a net zero information kind of book - there were certainly things I hadn't known before and learned thanks to it - but, in the end, it simply didn't leave much of an impression. At most, I'm likely to remember a few loosely connected trivia bits to bring up in conversations, and that's it.