David Profumo
Bathroom Safari
What’s Eating You? People and Parasites
By Eugene H Kaplan
Princeton University Press 302pp £18.95
The first book I ever reviewed for Auberon Waugh (late of this parish) was entitled A Dictionary of Disgusting Facts, and he was thrilled because it coincided with his policy of getting the words ‘Sex’ and ‘Filth’ onto the cover whenever possible. At that time I was working on a (still unfinished) cacademic treatise called ‘Anus Mirabilis’, an anthro-scatological survey of the importance of excretion and hygiene in human culture: I was therefore steeped in notions of what different people find revolting. How come the Zuni Indians perform a Urine Dance and consume faeces, but are forbidden to mention the word takka, meaning frog (having instead to say: ‘several-are-sitting-in-a-shallow-basin-where-they-are-in-liquid’)? The Bakairi abominate eating in public, yet the Dayaks happily drain off corpse fluids and mix them with their rice at funerals. Each to his own. But in two decades I have not had the pleasure of appraising such a repulsive volume as What’s Eating You? I heartily commend it to all LR readers.
The thirty chapters of Professor Eugene H Kaplan’s study all read like punchy little fables about different aspects of parasitology. He describes it as ‘a compendium of lurid stories’ designed to catch his students’ attention over the years – ‘a thread runs through them’, he adds, in an
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘In matters of the heart, cats are at the heart of the matter.’
So says @OSoden on the explosion of cat mania in the early twentieth century.
Oliver Soden - Pussies Galore
Oliver Soden: Pussies Galore - Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes
literaryreview.co.uk
A recent inquiry found that British security services had effectively licensed the IRA assassin known as Stakeknife to commit multiple murders.
@malodoherty picks apart the murky world of spying and counterespionage in Northern Ireland.
Malachi O’Doherty - Belfast Confidential
Malachi O’Doherty: Belfast Confidential - Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Espionage, Murder and Justice ...
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Creative non-fiction, I am so sick of this bullshit’, says Michael Anderson, an editor of the New York Times Book Review.
@rosalyster returns to its genesis.
Rosa Lyster - Two Sides to the Story
Rosa Lyster: Two Sides to the Story - The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble Rousers, O...
literaryreview.co.uk