History of Shit

Dominique Laporte's History of Shit is a dense and philosophical work on the removal of human excrement throughout history. Laporte’s book is poorly organized, but there are interesting observations on almost every page. I especially liked his argument that the methods for handling waste in 18th-century Western Europe were an important factor in the development of modern ideas of bourgeois individualism. I also liked this quotation from Paul Leroux, “By nature’s law every man is at once a producer and consumer, and if he consumes, he produces.”