It's hard NOT to judge a book by its cover, when the cover of the book includes a title that's hard to forget. These four books about unusual ways of thinking about history, specifically European history, may tickle your fancy as you stroll through some of the more remote parts of the library collection.No matter what you think of your own neighbors and neighborhood, you surely would be grateful to avoid what the folks of pre-industrial England (1600-1770) endured: small pox, rotting refuse in the streets, roaming pigs and dogs, carcasses in ditches, moldy food, poor air quality. . .not to mention the noise. With chapters about "Ugly", "Itchy", "Grotty", and "Gloomy" and accompanying illustrations Hubbub is an enlightening survey of English city life that will surely leave you feeling better about the 21st century.
This next item may not be safe for work, it is filled with so much filth. The filth of Shakespeare's London. But this is filth of a different sort. . .One glance at the chapter titles and you'll know whether or not this is something you want to explore and whether or not you want to know just how incredibly naughty Shakespeare plays really are. If you dare to know what sexual escapades Desdemona and Iago--or all sorts of other Shakespeare characters--are really discussing, take a peek at the pages of
Filthy Shakespeare. The author, Pauline Kiernan, holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she taught for many years. She's sure to make you blush.
And you'll just keep on blushing right on into the next century in City of Laughter : Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London. From the very first pages you'll be reading about "Lady Worsley's Bottom", a divorce trial, salacious color prints sold for a shilling, and a romp through a colorful history of "sex, bodies, and scandal". The author explains, "this is a book about the stories, jokes, and satirical exposures that later Georgian English people found funny. . .It focuses, not on the polished wit upon which the politer people prided themselves, but on their malicious, sardonic, and satirical humour: a peculiarly English humour if you like. . ." Perhaps this could lead to the historcial underpinnings of Monty Python's Flying Circus?
And now for something completely different. Or maybe not. Amy Butler Greenfield's A Perfect Red : Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire begins with the discovery by Spanish conquistadores of an extraordinary RED in the great marketplaces of Mexico in 1519. Butler, whose own grandfather and great-grandfather were dyers, then traces the history, influence, meaning, politics, and pirates of cochineal, "the legendary red dye that was once one of the world's most precious commodities."
